WhosOn Wins Editors Choice In Microsoft Certified Professionals Magazine

In a recent issue of Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine a new annual feature was introduced called "the Editors' Choice Awards", which profiled 22 top-notch products -- 11 winners and 11 honourable mentions -- that the editors and reviewers said they couldn't live without.

Parker Software was recognized with the Editors Choice in the category of IIS Monitoring for WhosOn!

Review Text:

"If you run a Web site, you know that keeping track of what's going on with the site can be difficult.  Sure, there are dozens of log file-analysis programs that can churn through the site logs and give you statistical summaries of what happened yesterday or last week: but what if you want to know what's happening on your Web site right now?  That's the problem Who's On is designed to solve.

The idea behind Who's On is pretty simple: It monitors your log files, either directly as disk files or indirectly via FTP, and extracts the most recent records from them every few seconds.  It then performs reverse DNS lookups and gives you a continuously updated screen, densely packed with information.  You can see which hits came from spiders instead of real people, watch the referrers (two clicks will open any referring site in its own browser), look at the history of individual sessions, and quickly see any 404 errors.  If a particular page is being hit harder than usual or a worm comes by and starts trying to run cmd.exe a few dozen times, you'll know it.

Who's On also tracks alerts and exceptions.  An alert is a visit that matches a particular condition - a referrer, DNS or key-word used in a search, for example.  alerts can play a sound file when AOL sends traffic your way or send an e-mail when a particular search term is used to find your site.  Exceptions are unusual events you may want to monitor.  for example, you can choose to have an exception raised if someone tries to request DLL or EXE files, if there are more than a specified number of simultaneous visitors, or if someone's trying to walk back up the path.  Exceptions are tracked on their own section of the user interface and can also be passed by e-mail.

Who's On's context menu for visitors provides some interesting functionality.  You can run a traceroute or ping test to any visitor on your site and open the page they're viewing or the one that referred them to you in an external browser window.

All in all, Who's On is a very useful tool.  It does one thing, does it extremely well, and does it at a good price."

Click here to see the magazine full review.

MCP Magazine said, "Congratulations! In a field that is filled with products to assist IT professionals in all aspects of their jobs, it is an outstanding accomplishment for your company to be single out for producing a toll that experts deem 'a product we love.' Again, congratulations on your excellent product and on providing the IT industry with a valuable tool that enhances and eases their professional responsibilities."