Corner Bowl Server Manager

Pros: Pulls all of our server logs into one location for easy review, as well as greatly simplifying record retention to better meet institutional requirements. The emailed reports summarizing and highlighting potential server issues are a real daily time save.

Cons: There is a learning curve when it comes to configuring the software with your servers and devices, as well as using the UI to configure various aspects of the program, but it is well worth it.

Overall: We are a small IT shop without the capacity to set up complex monitoring systems for our relatively small number of servers and devices. Server Manager fit the bill exactly for what we needed to streamline log collection and monitoring.

Pros: - Easy to use and customise most components
- Full of great features for monitoring IT environments of any size
- Well designed and logically set out in most cases
- Great support; always friendly, professional and timely
- Very well priced allowing for personal / small business use
- Frequent releases of updates and improvements

Cons: No specific cons! One feature that we would love to see added in the future is support for stateful failover - i.e. being able to manage multiple CBSM servers in a single environment and having a "backup" one takeover in the event that the "master" goes offline.

Overall: Overall, Corner Bowl Server Manager is a fantastic choice for IT administrators looking for an easy to use, feature rich, cost-effective monitoring solution. Kudos to the developers of CBSM for creating a standout product!

Pros: Cost effective and comprehensive monitoring tool that can retrieve logs for analysis or accept logs from many sources. Online videos help with various tasks.

Cons: Sometimes it's difficult to navigate the interface to get where you need to access the information sought. Likely more use would garner more familiarity with the interface and where functions reside.

Overall: Overall a good product with many features and capabilities all for a reasonable cost. This can satisfy a number of compliancy logging requirements well.

Pros: Monitor what I needed for a decent price.
New GUI looks better and faster.
Update Notification.
Very attentive support team.

Cons: I can't think of anything in the current state but I wish it has a web version and it has it's own boot disk.

Overall: Overall, I have a great experience with Cornerbowl. Their support is amazingly attentive. New GUI version is much faster (2022).

Pros: Good value for money.
It's not too involved - it's got all the main functions that we use.
Customizable templates and emails.
It just runs in the background and has never failed us.

Cons: A little bit of a learning curve to begin with, but once you have nailed how the system works is pretty simple.

Overall: We have been using CornerBowl for around 12 months and it has become invaluable for our small IT team.

We needed something that was good value for money and not overkill on reporting and running automated tasks. CornerBowl is a perfect fit.

It was easy to setup and learn and really quite flexible.

Apart from reporting on CPU, disk space and memory usage, we have it doing data clean-ups and it hasn't missed a beat.

The support has been really efficient and responsive and I highly recommend CornerBowl for a small team that is easy to implement and manage.