You can observe a lot by just watching. --Yogi Berra

Sentinel monitors applications, computer systems, and networks throughout the enterprise. Its primary purpose is to enable operations staff to tell at a glance whether mission-critical systems are working properly. If failures or other critical events are detected, Sentinel pages the appropriate personnel immediately, and highlights the failed component or system on its display. Problems are identified and reported in real time. The detailed state of various entities such as processes, computer resources, devices, and applications can be monitored, so that Sentinel can usually indicate not only that a component has failed, but also why. In many cases Sentinel can warn of imminent problems so that they can be corrected before a failure occurs.

Sentinel is configurable: the customer decides what is monitored and which events are significant. Sentinel is extensible, so that even custom applications with no existing monitoring hooks can be watched.

The Sentinel display can show the state of an enterprise from a global perspective, or drill down to a detail level to look at the condition of individual machines or processes. The web based display is configurable and can be sliced any way imaginable; the display screens can be organized by product, geographic location, physical network, application, customer, etc.  System tools, wizards, monitoring rules, and paging configuration are all accessed via the same display.

Sentinel maintains a searchable event database, so that there is always a permanent record of all events. Sentinel includes a powerful reporting tool which can quickly display problem history and downtime reports.

Sentinel is built to maximize system uptime and minimize system downtime.