provided by: 
Originally published at Internet.comBilled by the vendor as "proactive remote control for system administrators," HipCheck consists of three separate components that together enable network administrators to both monitor and perform basic management tasks on network servers running Windows (XP/2003) or SCO UNIX (OpenServer 5.0.7/6, UnixWare 7.1.4) from remote Windows Mobile-based phones. With HipCheck, administrators can define alert criteria based on multiple monitored parameters, receive the alerts, manage the alerts, and also execute basic administrative commands on the monitored servers; all from their phone (Windows Mobile 5 or Windows Mobile for Pocket PC 2003) or Windows PC computer.
HipCheck consists of three primary components: the HipCheck Agent, the HipCheck Client, and the HipCheck Mobility Server.
The HipCheck Agent is installed on each of the monitored servers, and itself is a background process that monitors the server and the processes running on it. The HipCheck Agent reports its collected data to the HipCheck Mobility Server.
The HipCheck Client is installed on either a Pocket PC or a Windows PC, and provides the graphical interface with which the administrator will interact. The vendor states that all communications between the phone and the Mobility Server are encrypted.
The Mobility Server operates as the central communication hub of the platform; receiving data from Agents, sending alerts to Clients, providing an alert management interface to the Clients, and relaying basic administrative commands from the clients back to the servers. Only one connection through the firewall is required to the Mobility Server from a group of Agents; an architecture that is facilitated by a Relay Agent, that can collect the data from each of a group of servers and send the data to the Mobility Server through that single connection. The Mobility Server can be deployed in three possible ways: It can be hosted entirely by the vendor, hosted by one of the vendor's partners, or it can be deployed in the customer's data center.
As aforementioned, alerts can be defined by the administrator based on multiple parameters that are monitored by the agents, including total/free memory, hard disk space, CPU usage, service status (including warnings if a service starts or stops), and printer status, to name a few. (The user can additionally define 3rd party or their own applications as services.) Such alerts are delivered to the administrator via SMS or E-mail. Administrators can then respond to the alerts by issuing basic actions that are then relayed to the servers, including stop/start/restart a service, cancel a process, resume/pause a printer and cancel a print job.
HipCheck is available now. Base pricing varies based on the number of users, servers and period of time that the service is used on the Windows Mobile device; and ranges from $10 to $18 per monitored system per month.
Contact The SCO Group for further information.Author: EITPlanet Staff
Read article at Internet.com site