Called "a good tool for highly secure environments," RippleTech Inc.'s compliance product, Informant, is used for database and application monitoring. Informant takes the Bronze Award in the General SQL Server category in SearchSQLServer.com's Products of the Year 2006.

Informant 1.1 is a network appliance that builds a log of database activity, monitors the log in real time and issues alerts and reports. Because the technology is an appliance, it can analyze traffic and capture user sessions without any network performance degradation.

Some of the feature highlights include:

• Monitoring of paths to corporate and customer data whether the data is located in applications or from users, malware, utilities, back door queries or LAMP scripting
  
• Continuous real-time logging of all SQL and HTTP activity by intelligently analyzing the underlying application and Web and database application protocols
  
• Capturing dta changes originated by users and tracking access control and schema changes initiated by administrators

Apart from liking Informant for highly secure environments, our judges think the price and performance are reasonable.

Informant comes as software or as a hardened appliance. Pricing starts at $2,495.

SearchSQLServer.com