This week, a couple of great product updates: First,a few weeks ago we wrote about a program called Lightroom that's published by Adobe.

We were very impressed with that last beta release and we noted that Adobe planned to release a Windows version later this year. Well, "later" has come to pass, and Adobe Lightroom has been renamed Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, a new version has been released, and a Windows XP Service Pack 2 version appeared on Sept. 24.

This is the Beta 4 release, which will stop working on Feb. 28, 2007. Until then, you can play with it to your heart's content for free.

The Windows version looks more or less just like the Mac OS X version. Performance has improved, CD/DVD burning has been added, many of the editing features have been enhanced or otherwise polished, and the program appears to be even better than before. Check it out.

Our second update is for a tool we covered three years ago that has improved a lot in the meantime: Paessler Router Traffic Grapher (PRTG) from Paessler AG.

PRTG is a tool for monitoring and classifying the performance of the available attributes of network devices that support SNMP. The program provides near real-time metrics in tables and graphs and stores historical data, making PRTG very useful for trend analysis.

After PRTG is installed you can add SNMP sensors individually or have PRTG scan for SNMP-supported devices. PRTG speaks SNMP Versions 1, 2c (which supports 64-bit counters for gigabit links), and 3 (which supports MD5 and SHA authentication and DES encryption, if you want it).

You can scan for the standard SNMP-supported traffic sensors, or you can have PRTG sniff for data packets to determine traffic flow. You can rely on devices that support Cisco's Netflow protocol to generate your traffic data, or you can use the built-in ping service to test the performance of any accessible server, whether or not it is in your network.

Of course SNMP data covers a lot more than network performance. We set up PRTG to monitor the CPU load on our servers and workstations, and had it keep an eye on disk storage and RAM use.

PRTG displays a composite graph of data from any selection of sensors for periods of one hour, 24 hours, 30 days and 365 days averaged over 10 seconds, five minutes, hourly and daily (the averaging period can be customized). You also can view individual graphs. If only a single sensor is selected, you can view tables of the underlying data for various time periods, and graphs and tables can be enlarged, printed or copied to the clipboard.

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