If you despair because good network management and monitoring tools can eclipse your company's total annual revenue, take heart. In this Clear Choice test of seven entry-level network monitoring and management offerings, we found these tools feature-rich, mature, reliable, easy to use, able to monitor a diverse network and affordable (for this test, that means the starting price is less than $1,500).

For any size network, the ideal management and monitoring tool efficiently and accurately discovers servers, clients, routers, switches and other devices. It revealingly displays a map of the discovered nodes, it faithfully checks for connectivity problems and it accurately notices performance problems such as excessive network utilization or an overburdened server.

It alerts you to these problems and takes escalation actions until the problem is fixed. It can in some cases automatically solve a problem by restarting a program, running a script or running an external program. It produces useful reports that show the health of your network, measure the network use and forecast trends to help you plan the network's future capacities.

The ideal monitoring tool is reliable, secure and easy to use.

These are the ideal criteria against which we measured products from the seven vendors that participated in this test (see How we tested network-management products). In our lab, we tested AdventNet's OpManager, Avocent's LANDesk Server Manager, Dartware's Intermapper, Fluke's NetTool Inline Network Tester and LinkRunner Network MultiMeter, Heroix's Longitude, ipMonitor's ipMonitor, and Neon Software's LANsurveyor and CyberGauge.

While all these tools showed their mettle, maturity and merit in our tests, ipMonitor edged out the competition for the Clear Choice Award by virtue of its accurate discovery process, pervasive device and application monitoring, ability to fix some problems automatically, ease of use and good security.