Merce offers an integrated network monitoring system, called Merce Insight. It is currently available only as a part of Merce.

Real-time health monitoring: Merce Insight monitors detailed health parameters of all Merce servers, including OS-level resource usage (e.g. disk usage, RAM usage, CPU load), network service health (e.g. response times for SMTP or POP3 services) and one or two key security attributes. It also monitors all SNMP-aware components like Unix or modern Windows servers, routers, L3 switches, or other devices. All attributes are polled or measured periodically by Merce Insight agents running on Merce servers. These readings are then reported to the Merce master server as Merce Insight "events", transmitted as lightweight UDP packets. The Merce Insight manager running on the Merce master server collects these "events", records them in a database, and analyses their values against pre-set rules to raise exceptions.

Make your own rules: The Merce Insight system keeps a record in its relational database for each received event. This allows rapid querying of historical data to generate powerful views of network and system behaviour. It also allows the Merce Insight Rulebase Manager (MI RM) to implement powerful rule types in its rule base. The MI RM provides a UI to the systems manager to allow him to define powerful rules which draw relationships between current system behaviour and historical behaviour. For instance, one rule type accepts events if their values fall within a certain range of their historical average value, thus setting a limit on the rate of change of values. The systems manager can specify "Raise an alert if the CPU utilisation of my Hong Kong mail server exceeds 150% of its average CPU utilisation."

Get insight into your WAN links: Merce Insight is useful in monitoring link quality of WAN links. It monitors link uptime or availability, packet round-trip latency (i.e. ping times), packet round-trip jitter, packet loss percentages, and instantaneous data throughput on the pipe. These parameters put together give a clear indication of the health of a WAN link. When an organisation leases data links from a telco, the specifications on paper are very difficult to correlate to perceived performance. Long distance high-speed WAN links are often expensive components of the recurring IT budget of the organisation, and their health needs to be monitored in quantitative terms to correlate budgetary allocation with perceived performance. Merce bridges this gap accurately, simply and automatically. With the set of parameters that Merce reports for each WAN link, the IS management team can monitor capacity utilisation of WAN links and engage in proactive capacity augmentation planning.