Gateway Status

Seemingly the most useful views of all the predefined views are the Gateway Status views. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, these views identify devices by their product or group them all together. Choosing one of the devices presents you with other options, and it is up to you to invoke them in order to reveal even more information. As we briefly mentioned already, choosing a device results in information about your devices to populate the Results View. In the previous Figure 15.8, you saw that the information told much about the gateway. In fact, SmartView Monitor reported which packages are installed on the device, which versions, the server uptime, the server OS platform, and other informative tidbits about the device. This section goes on to describe the three options available as links in our firewall device window. These links rest just below the Concurrent Connections count in the Results View from Figure 15.8. Let’s explore these options to see what kind of information they reveal.

System Information

When you click the System Information link you get more information about the CPU, disk, and memory utilization. These statistics are critical in nature regarding your gateway; specifically, your firewall. If any of these resources become exhausted or consistently run high, you need to consider ramping up in some sense. Either that, or there is a problem with a runaway thread/process. In addition, you could be under some sort of attack that is causing the gateway to consume additional resources. In any event, you need to respond immediately to high utilization whether it’s a disk, CPU, or memory.