Christian Wilson decided to stop using Network General's Sniffer and replace it with Network Instruments’ Observer for one reason: price.

The network administrator at Select Comfort, of Minneapolis, decided a few years back to swap out his Sniffer, which at the time cost about $26,000, and start using Observer software for about $1,000.

Wilson admits he hasn't used Sniffer in about four years, but the price comparison at the time forced him to change products. And today he can't say he notices a difference, because Observer shows him the data he needs to optimize the bandwidth that bed manufacturer Select Comfort has available to application traffic.

"We are able to monitor our WAN bandwidth and resource utilization across nets in real time, or we can baseline it over days or months to see if it is really slow or if that's just our perception," Wilson says.

Wilson uses the product to monitor application traffic and bandwidth utilization across his company's network. The data collected by Observer helps him understand when performance slowdowns have more to do with the application, the network or the end user.

"Observer can analyze the data and make simple suggestions as to how to fix the problems, in real, plain and simple English," Wilson says. "You don't have to be a network Yoda to figure that out."

Select Comfort, creator of the Sleep Number bed, has more 2,600 employees, 368 retail outlets, and reported net sales of $458 million in 2003. The company has manufacturing plants in South Carolina and Utah.

Wilson runs Observer in a distributed software design. He has the software loaded on one machine in corporate headquarters and has distributed five probes to three warehouse locations and a couple of collocation centers. The software helps him gather data remotely without having to send an administrator out to analyze traffic across the network.

By using Observer to also manage devices at the retail stores, he can monitor traffic without having to buy 400 probes.

"Our retail stores are connected either via DSL or VPN - and to Observer, they just look like an extension of our network. We can ping any device and manage them from Observer," he says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.