InterMapper® is a network monitoring and alerting tool. It was initially developed at Dartmouth College where Bill Fisher and Rich Brown worked to create a tool that would monitor the College's locally-developed New England Digital (NED) AppleTalk and IP routers. These minicomputer-based routers had extremely limited memory, and thus couldn't ever be programmed to speak SNMP. With more than one hundred of these routers in the basements of buildings on campus, the College decided to write its own tool for monitoring the network. As more SNMP-speaking commercial equipment was brought on campus, InterMapper was extended to support SNMP, and later other probe types.
The program was good enough that Rich and Bill were encouraged to market InterMapper commercially beginning in July 1996. (They had some practice marketing software from their experience selling the MacPing software from 1992.) Dartmouth also began selling their SNMP Watcher MIB console in March 1999.
In April, 2000, Dartmouth College transferred title to InterMapper, MacPing, and SNMP Watcher to a newly-formed company, Dartware, LLC. The founders were Rich Brown, Bill Fisher, and Stuart Pompian, an area businessman. Dartmouth College retains a share of the ownership of Dartware which will continue development and marketing of those software products. New to the InterMapper team are Tex Clayton, programmer, and John Sutton, Customer Service.
In July 2000, Dartware released InterMapper 3.0. In July 2001, we introduced version 3.5.
January 2002 introduced InterMapper 3.6, which was the first version to support InterMapper Remote. Version 3.6.1 shipped in April 2002.
In January 2003, InterMapper 4.0 shipped on MacOS Classic, MacOS X, and Windows NT/2000/XP. In March 2003, we added several Linux and Unix distributions.
We shipped cross-platform charts, and Nagios and Big Brother probes in version 4.1 in August 2003. InterMapper 4.2 brought Maintenance Mode, arithmetic in probes, helper applications, and a number of miscellaneous changes in March 2004.
InterMapper 4.3 was released in March 2005, bringing the ability to monitor NT services, importing and exporting of data, geographic importing, improved icon display, and the Interfaces window.
InterMapper 4.4 was released in October 2005. Its main features include the ability to test devices using SNMPv3, a Device List window, syslog notifications, WINS naming, a System Tray and menu bar application for Windows and OSX, respectively, double-click actions, a universal binary version for MacOS X, and a number of new probes.
InterMapper 4.5 was released in October 2006. It provides significant improvements to the GUI to make the product easier to use and configure; autosave; writing events to a syslog server, enhanced trap processing; a new "critical" status that is more severe than the Alarm status; alarms on packet loss and round-trip time; new import/export facilities; ignore outages/allow periodic reprobe behaviors; and a number of new probes and minor features.
InterMapper 4.6. was released in July 2007. It introduces the InterMapper DataCenter, which includes in its first release the new InterMapper Authentication Server, allowing authentication of InterMapper users via Radius, Active Directory, LDAP, and Open Directory. It also includes shared polling; autolayout; an improved interfaces window; periodic check for updates; and a number of new probes and minor features.
InterMapper 5.0 was released in May 2008. The major features were the ability to monitor and test IPv6 devices and the ability to write data directly into an SQL database. Among the minor features was the ability to organize maps into folders, and enhanced support for Nagios plugins and the PERFDATA results.
InterMapper 5.1 was released in April 2009, introducing Probe Groups, SMS Notifiers, and integration with Google Earth. Minor features included the ability arrange icons in a m by n grid, and to import and export a map via command-line."
InterMapper Flows 1.0 brought an integrated NetFlow analyzer to InterMapper in October 2008. This allowed customers to see top talkers, top ports, and top sessions. It required InterMapper 5.0.5.
InterMapper Flows 1.1 shipped in May 2009, bringing support for sFlow v2, 4, and 5, the ability to view data by bits or bytes per second, increased robustness on several platforms, and significant performance enhancements. This requires InterMapper 5.1 or newer.
October 2009 saw the release of InterMapper Flows 1.2, which added Netflow v7 support, as well as JFlow support for Juniper equipment. It also provided a handy Whois lookup feature and the ability to copy graphs to a clipboard.
InterMapper 5.2 shipped in January 2010, bringing the HTTP-based API, through which you can acknowledge down devices, and import and export files and tables. It also added a number of WMI probes, providing access to Windows machine status through the Windows Management Instrumentation interface. The new Companion Script feature allowed the embedding of a script in a command-line probe file.
InterMapper 5.3 shipped in June 2010, and brought Localization into Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese, improvements to database export performance and to handling maps with thousands of interfaces, and a number of minor features.
In January 2013, Help/Systems, LLC announced the acquisition of Dartware. Help/Systems, LLC is a world leader in systems management, security, and business intelligence software.