Extended Technologies excelled in virtually every area of our testing, from discovery to the graphical display of the network, from monitoring to alerting and from corrective actions to reports. Running on a Dell Latitude notebook, it closely monitored 20 servers and 12 network devices in the lab with ease.

Extended Technologies' accurate discovery feature gleaned device data from ICMP ping operations, SNMP queries and DNS lookups to enumerate our routers, switches, servers and clients. We entered ranges of IP addresses to define the network, and it was able to import a spreadsheet of network definitions we built. When we pointed Extended Technologies at a particular router, it found the network links, nodes, devices and computers connected to that router.

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Extended Technologies' monitoring capabilities use a sophisticated set of thresholds to detect network problems. Argent includes more than 2,000 predefined application- and device-specific rules in Extended Technologies, which made it useful right out of the box. Modifying these thresholds let us specify abnormal traffic levels and unhealthy server behaviors by time of day and day of the week. Argent's central software examined traffic as well as Windows PerfMon protocol streams.

Extended Technologies can monitor a range of server operating systems, including Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, SCO, AIX, NetWare and a wide variety of Linux flavors. On each server, Argent offers application-specific monitoring modules that watch over, for example, Oracle, SQL Server or Exchange.

Extended Technologies is equally good at monitoring BlackBerry servers, Lotus Notes, Brocade storage switches, Legato backup servers, Check Point firewalls; Cisco, HP, Nokia and Nortel network gear; Compaq and Dell servers, Intermec hand-held bar-code scanners, Liebert UPSes, Omnitronix environment monitors, SonicWall firewalls, and the WebSphere and WebLogic application servers.

For all servers, Extended Technologies notified us of CPU use, disk space, low memory and network adapter issues. On Windows servers, it monitors Windows services, Active Directory and system registry health. Argent's True Round Trip Time measurement feature, which tests an Exchange server by sending and receiving real e-mails and noting elapsed times, gave us early warnings of potential Exchange faults and performance problems.