Get an in-depth review of Corner Bowl’s collection of server management tools, including comparisons to similar products
To help you maintain your network and provide better assistance, Corner Bowl offers a packed suite of solutions called the Corner Bowl Server Manager. Each product that Corner Bowl offers has been carefully developed to meet a particular need of your server infrastructure. To address the need for better server monitoring and management, the solution combines various tools into a single unified solution rather than selecting a variety of solutions that each independently.
Node packs of Corner Bowl Server Manager are offered for purchase. A node is any distinct IP address and/or hostname that the software monitors, scans, or otherwise manages. A single node can cost approximately $21, but the costs massively decrease with bulk purchases—for example, 100 nodes costs around $672.
Corner Bowl Server Manager includes a variety of products, but the six headline products that serve as the core of the solution are as follows:
- Event Log Manager The Event Log Manager from Corner Bowl is a specialized technique for enterprise-level log analysis. By centrally storing Windows Event Logs, the software solution satisfies several compliance requirements.
- Windows Syslog Server A top-tier syslog management and monitoring tool that is centrally located. By collecting and monitoring all of your mission-critical hardware’s syslogs, the system aids in compliance.
- Text Log Monitor A centralized text-based application log management solution, Corner Bowl Text Log Monitor is an application log management tool.
- Disk Monitor With charts of directory sizes and prior free disk space, Corner Bowl’s Disk Monitor keeps track of online status, changes in free space over time, and available disk space.
- Internet Server Monitor Corner Bowl provides the ability to evaluate the server applications’ efficacy in addition to verifying their availability.
- Ransomware & File Integrity Monitor
When a file is read, changed, or deleted, the File Integrity Monitor from Corner Bowl continuously searches folders and notifies you. To create baselines for file access, file attribute, and file content, it searches directories using Windows shares, SFTP/SSH, and FTP/S.
Event Log Manager
Corner Bowl’s Event Log Manager is a specialized method for enterprise-level log analysis. The software solution fulfills numerous compliance requirements by centrally saving Windows Event Logs. Network administrators that oversee a sizable number of networking devices on the premises will find this to be extremely helpful. As well as the ability to consolidate entries from Event Log files into MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or SQLite centrally.
The software doesn’t have a lot of automation capabilities other than automatically deleting expired centralized consolidated log entries and native log file backups. The software primarily focuses on monitoring and analysis, but it also includes impressive auditing and compliance reporting. The system can also configure centralized log consolidation and log monitoring automatically after discovering new Active Directory servers and workstations.
The Event Log Manager tracks and downloads security, system, and application log files from any platform using a combination of WMI, Windows Shares, FTP/SSH, and FTP/S. Installs as an agent if desired, removing the need to run as a domain admin while reliably centralizing Event Logs 12x faster than native Windows APIs. Additionally, by proxying over your own Azure Relay Hybrid Connection, the solution removes the requirement to open ports on Work From Home (WFH) user networks.
Windows Syslog Server
A centralized Syslog management and monitoring tool of the highest level for businesses. The system helps you comply by aggregating and keeping track of syslogs from all of your mission-critical hardware, consolidates syslog messages centrally, and sends them to MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or SQLite. Syslog messages are monitored in real-time for important occurrences, while the system also reports on compliance and auditing schedules.
Corner Bowl Windows Syslog Server sends notifications and alerts by email and SMS, and can also remotely run personalized PowerShell scripts. It automatically removes backups of native log files and centralized consolidated log items that have expired, and enables IT professionals to swiftly search, filter, and analyze GB-sized log files by offering a paged view of log data.
To accept messages, monitor, and consolidate syslogs from devices like switches, routers, and firewalls, Windows Syslog Server launches TCP and UDP Syslog Servers. Log entries are stored in either a local or remote log repository after being gathered. You have six options for centralizing your log entries with Windows Syslog Server, including SQLite, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Elasticsearch, CosmosDB, and our proprietary binary flat-file system.
Text Log Monitor
Corner BowlText Log Monitor is a centralized text-based application log management software tool and application log management software tool. The product saves Linux audit logs and application logs in a single area, meeting numerous compliance requirements. Additionally, it is designed to consolidate entries from text log files into MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or SQLite centrally.
Using the system, log files are monitored in real-time for important events, while it can also report on compliance and auditing schedules. Corner BowlText Log Monitor can also send notifications and alerts by email and SMS. Much like its counterparts, it remotely runs personalized PowerShell scripts and automatically removes backups of native log files and centralized consolidated log items that have expired.
The solution supports text log files with and without delimiters. Delimited files, like syslog files, adhere to a predefined format that allows for automated parsing across several lines. Line by line, until the next entry delimiter is reached, delimited files are read. When all lines have been reached, they are concatenated to create an entry. Since non-delimited files do not adhere to any particular format, programmatic parsing is not possible. Line by line, non-delimited log files are read and filtered.
Your company might need to store important log files for future reference and accountability due to compliance obligations. Text Log Monitor will archive your logs to CSV, HTML, TXT, or XML files as well as to a central SQL Server or MySQL database in their entirety or as a subset. You can also create recurring online and email reports that include particular entries, for instance, get a daily email with vital application data from the service log file.
Disk Monitor
Corner Bowl’s Disk Monitor monitors online status, changes in free space over time, and available disk space, while also including charts of directory sizes and previous free disk space. The solution effectively brings together the disk space data from all of your servers into a single view. SMART predictive disk failure status is centrally monitored for your Windows servers, and in the Management Console, you may view all available SMART properties across your infrastructure.
The solution is designed to keep track of the size of the directory and how it changes over time, with a list of the top-ranking biggest files that set off the monitor included in alerts. You can also easily locate the biggest files across all of your servers, by using Disk Monitor. With the largest files reports, you may search for the largest files on a disk or inside a directory on Windows, Linux, and other Unix flavors using SFTP/SSH and FTP/S.
By employing the solution on your network, you can receive notifications or a log any time a file or subdirectory is added, changed, removed, or given a new name. Using inclusion and exclusion masks, you can further configure the Directory Watcher to restrict results to a particular collection of files. For instance, report all modifications to files ending in.txt while excluding those with the name *_output.txt. Results can be logged to a CSV file to satisfy compliance needs or simply emailed.
Disk Monitor can automatically remove temporary files from all system, user, and browser temporary directories on local and remote Windows systems, while also providing you with the means to create on-demand file extension reports. The current extensions, total size, and file count are reported in file extension reports. When finished, you can export it to a file, as well as drill down into a directory structure to determine which subdirectories contain the files of interest.
Internet Server Monitor
In most situations, Corner Bowl offers the capability to assess the effectiveness of the server applications in addition to checking their availability. To test the server’s availability and confirm the returned URL or document contains the appropriate content, for instance, an HTTP or web monitor might be developed. To track docker containers, CPU, and memory usage, Corner Bowl connects with the docker engine REST API. Responsive actions, such as email alerts, are sent when resource consumption exceeds the configured thresholds and include information about each docker container.
When a primary server fails, system administrators can set up a monitoring hierarchy to stop, start, or sluggishly increase backup system monitoring. For instance, the system may shut down the dependent memory and CPU monitoring when a ping monitor on a primary server fails, while also throttling up the ping, memory, and CPU monitors on your backup server.
Timeouts occur frequently on monitors like the Ping Monitor. You can define failure rates using the tools offered by Internet Server Monitor. When pinging a server every second, for instance, you can set the ping monitor to only start up after three attempts have failed within ten seconds. Additionally, Corner Bowl stores all monitor results in the local file system before erasing the previous status by the data retention guidelines that your network administrator specifies.
Ransomware & File Integrity Monitor
The File Integrity Monitor from Corner Bowl continuously re-scans directories to alert you whenever a file is read, edited, or deleted. It scans directories utilizing Windows shares, SFTP/SSH, and FTP/S to generate baselines for file access, file attribute, and file content. supports a variety of hardware, including Windows, Linux, and Unix.
To create real-time monitors, the solution provides you with the capabilities to set up object access auditing on your Windows servers. Assign the pre-installed file system auditing monitor to send email notifications once it has been configured. A PowerShell script that modifies your firewall rules to block the attacker’s IP address in real time can be run after forwarding the IP address the attack started from.
On your Windows servers, set up Real-Time Directory Monitors so that whenever a file is edited, deleted, renamed, relocated, or created in any directory or subdirectory, email notifications are sent to your IT management team. This ensures that your ransomware monitoring software solution has in-built redundancy yet is still kept lightweight.
Corner Bowl Server Manager Alternatives
- Pandora FMS Provides comprehensive monitoring for your systems and overall network. Pandora FMS’s lineup of monitoring tools can compete with Corner Bowl’s various monitoring products on an individual level. Especially with the SaaS licensing model on their whole product lineup, Pandora FMS presents a worthy challenger.
- SendQuick Cloud A cloud-based platform for managing notifications and monitoring system availability is called SendQuick Cloud. It collaborates with public cloud services to keep an eye on your network, systems, apps, and services while alerting the on-call team to any problems. Where Corner Bowl focuses on monitoring credibility, SendQuick Cloud is focused on the automated notifications aspect of monitoring.
- Dynatrace Focused on monitoring through cloud-based infrastructure integrations that use intelligent systems such as an AI-driven data platform to solve monitoring issues. Dynatrace better serves as a tool for expanding your network instead of a responsive background system.
- Datadog A professional solution offering a huge range of functional analysis and automation functions that are developed with scalability in mind. This solution is worthwhile for everyone to examine because it supports theoretically an infinite number of data sources and has a flexible pricing structure.
- New Relic Premium services can be added to this otherwise free monitoring platform that contains intelligent health and performance monitoring. This solution provides a free alternative that still manages to meet the high demands of Corner Bowl’s Server Manager.
