AdRem is a maker of networking utilities and tools and has been doing so since 1998. It's probably more familiar to the readers of my NetWare newsletter (link below) especially as it burst on the scene with a very secure remote console utility for NetWare replacing Novell's unsecure Rconsole product.

Lately, like most people involved in NetWare, AdRem has seen the writing on the wall for Novell's network operating system and has branched out into heterogeneous network management tools, such as NetCrunch (see link below). This week it is announcing two products that serve to simplify network management. Both are Windows-based and equally at home on a homogeneous Windows network or on a thoroughly mixed up heterogeneous one.

An aside: One vendor, who's making quite a bit of money helping a major bank sort out the IT departments of the various acquisitions it has made (and keeps making), told me recently that the bank is still using NeXT computers (see link below) and has at least one still-functioning Altos box - the first commercial version of a computer based on Xerox PARC research, years before the Apple. That's a heterogeneous network!

The first tool is AdRem SNMP Manager, which provides a single console that consolidates and eases a range of SNMP-related activities, including auto-discovery of SNMP devices, SNMP trap receiving and forwarding, and Management Information Base viewing, compiling, loading, editing and walking.

While it's certainly not the first console for SNMP, AdRem's product is worth considering because of its SNMP View Editor module, with which you can freely manipulate SNMP v1, v2 and v3 data by creating new lists, tables and forms for customized profiles of a device. Apart from providing real-time visibility into crucial data, this tool enables you to set writable SNMP values as well as display derived values of selected device utilization statistics. With this latter option, the often obscure, raw SNMP data can be turned into actionable intelligence. Not bad!

Like SNMP Manager, the second release from AdRem, called iTools, isn't anything new or revolutionary. ITools is an integrated windows-driven console that provides single-click access to familiar administrative utilities such as Ping, Trace Route, Port/Service Scanner, Connection analyzer, DNS lookup, SNMP manager and others. By integrating these utilities, AdRem has eliminated the need to switch among multiple windows or command lines for these reference tools while adding the benefit of data export and printing capabilities.