Sawmill review

As a network administrator, reports are paramount to understanding the various problems that affect the network and the types of issues that may initially pose no threat to its stability, but may later on become potentially dangerous. If you want to have the peace of mind that you'll know everything happening on your network at any given time, then Sawmill is one of the most reliable and popular network analyzers you can currently use. With it, you can receive complex stats on the vital info you need in order to ensure your network runs smoothly.

Perfect for beginners

It’s very important to keep in mind that Sawmill is geared towards beginner network administrators and not only does it have a very neat and easy to use interface, but also extremely powerful features. To ensure that you're going to learn how to use it as soon as possible, the tool comes with detailed documentation. By allowing you to read and manage multiple logs, it's only going to be a matter of time until you'll realize how much easier it's going to be to do your job with this versatile tool.

Compatibility

One of the main pros of Sawmill is the fact that it works across various types of platforms and can be used with internet server logs as well. However, its compatibility doesn't stop there, so as long as the files you use with it as txt files, it won't have any problems handling them. When it comes to the reports, they feature cross-links for navigation, are nicely presented and hierarchical. Sawmill is highly configurable and it includes advanced user tracking, but also live graphs and reports.

Sawmill is currently one of the most user friendly applications of its kind and thanks to its incredible functionality, it can add a whole new dimension to log file analysis.

Main features:

1. It can process almost any log file.

2. Compatible with a wide rang of platforms.

3. Highly configurable.

4. Simple to install.

5. Extremely fast.

6. Database driven.

7. Package of robust analysis tools.

8. Live graphs and reports.

9. Extensive documentation.

10.Simple to use.

What's new in version 8.5

There were quite a few changes made in the latest version compared to version 8.1, with some of the most notable ones being improved memory usage and performance. In fact, the latest version of Sawmill features a new type of engine for accessing its databases and files and because of that, it can make use of memory more efficiently.

The way it works is that the tool compares the amount of memory required to perform a certain function to the available system memory and then proceeds to allocate memory so it doesn't exceed a certain threshold. What makes this allocation special is the fact that Sawmill won't allocate too much or too little memory, but just the right amount required as to not disrupt overall system performance and stability.

As a user, you can tweak how much memory Sawmill can use depending on a wide range of factors. Thanks to these improvements and many other performance optimizations, the latest version of Sawmill is 50 to 100 percent faster compared to version 8.1.

Bottom Line

If you have a company and you want to have the peace of mind that you'll no longer have to deal with time consuming, reputation damaging, but also costly outages, you should certainly start using Nagios as soon as possible. This is an incredible network monitor analyzer that does an excellent job once it's set up and running. Just make sure it's installed and configured by a licensed network expert. You can also tweak it to meet your specific needs, making it one of the few flexible network analyzers you can currently get. All in all, if you want to boost profits and improve customers satisfaction, Nagios is by far the best solution you should start using as soon as possible.