A midsize network ranging from 1,000 to 20,000 nodes exhibits virtually all the same complexities and troubleshooting challenges as a meganetwork with more than 50,000 nodes. Monitoring and management products for midrange networks, therefore, need to measure up to that challenge.

The ideal management and monitoring tool efficiently and accurately discovers servers, clients, routers, switches and other devices. It revealingly and helpfully displays a map of the discovered nodes. It faithfully checks for connectivity problems, and it intelligently notices performance problems.

It provides alerts via e-mail or pager, and it can alert multiple people until the problem is fixed. In some cases, it can automatically solve a problem by restarting a program, running a script or triggering an external program. It produces useful reports that show the health of your network, measures use of the network and its components over time, and forecasts trends to help you plan the network's future capacities. The ideal monitoring tool is reliable, secure and easy to use.

It's a pretty tall order. While we invited more than two dozen vendors to participate in this Clear Choice Test, five vendors stepped up, entering a total of six products.

We tested Argent Software's Extended Technologies 8.0a, HP's Mercury SiteScope 8.5, HP's OpenView Network Node Manager 7.51, OpenView Internet Services 6.0 and OpenView Operations Manager 7.5, Netcordia's NetMRI Enterprise Network Analysis Appliance 2.0 and NetMRI Operations Center, Netmon's Netmon Professional Edition 4.5 and Network General's NetVigil Enterprise 4.2 SP1 in our lab (see How we tested network-management devices).