Update Checks and Privacy

Many customers asked us for a simple way to be notified of product updates. We responded by building it into the application via the Settings dialog. You can control whether you check for updates, and how you are notified.

When an update check happens, an HTTP request is made to a page on our webserver. Appended to the URL we send the current version that is running (so the web server can decide whether a newer version is available or not, as well as whether any version-specific message needs to be sent back).

The product also sends a few additional pieces of information for statistical purposes, such as:

• Whether the product is in demo mode or not
• The number of servers being monitored
• A hard-coded value of "30" (long story...)
• The number of monitor runs
• How many Event Log entries have been checked in the past hour
• How many Performance Counter values have been checked in the past hour

Nothing in the list above identifies you, your company or the computer (no license information, no machine names, no expiration dates, no email addresses, etc). While it's true that all HTTP requests send an IP address, we do not and will not be tracking that.

Basically we'd like to eventually be able to report (well, brag) that X number of servers are being monitored by our products. We hope this update check mechanism will be viewed as a win-win.

Support & Maintenance Expiration Check

To check if your Support & Maintenance is ending, information from one of your licenses is sent to our server. In this case, we are able to identify your company, and in fact have to in order to fulfill the request. Support & Maintenance Expiration checks only happen at three times:

• When a new license is activated (the expiration date is retrieved and saved on your server)
• When you explicitly request it via the Check Now button in the Console
• When the saved expiration date is near, another check is made to see if the Support & Maintenance has already been renewed (so we don't send you an out of date reminder)

Although we do receive a license ID in this case, we're not doing anything with it other than fulfilling your request. It is NOT getting sent to any marketing group (inside or outside the company), or getting used for any other purposes.