IpMonitor gets top billing among formidable competition
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.
How we tested network-management products
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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.
Heroix Longitude battled ipMonitor neck-and-neck with a wealth of features, including support for highly diverse networks, superior service-level agreement tracking, ease of use and well-designed reports.
How we tested network-management products
We evaluated each product’s ability to manage, administer, update, monitor, report on, diagnose, troubleshoot, reset, reconfigure and secure network devices, servers and clients. Virtually all our testing took place across 512Kbps , T-1 and T-3 WAN links.
The ability to resolve a problem automatically was a plus. We tested the sending of alerts as well as the processing of incoming alerts. We produced reports to show device and computer status information, network-use trends, security breaches, availability and uptime information, network baseline information and graphical maps of the network. We also tested any special features a product offered.
The testbed network consisted of six, Fast Ethernet subnet domains routed by Cisco routers. Our lab’s various computing platforms included Windows NT/98/2000/ME/XP, Solaris 8.0 and Macintosh System 8.
The relational databases on the network were Oracle 8i, IBM DB2 Universal Database, Sybase Adaptive Server 12.5 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. A Compaq ProLiant ML570 computer with four 900 MHz CPUs, 2GB RAM and 135GB hard disks, running Windows 2000 Advanced Server, was our test platform for all the products’ server components, while a Dell Latitude D505 running XP was our monitoring client.
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Conclusion
We found all seven product combinations mature, feature-rich, robust, useful and affordable. However, each one is built to home in on particular network and server issues that make it appropriate for solving certain problems or monitoring certain kinds of networks.
Overall, ipMonitor gave us the best mix of discovery, monitoring of diverse devices and applications, flexible notifications, useful reports and ease of use. It’s our all-around winner.
Nance runs Network Testing Labs and is the author of Introduction to Networking, 4th Edition and Client/Server LAN Programming. He can be reached at barryn@erols.com.
Nance is also a member of the Network World Lab Alliance, a cooperative of the premier reviewers in the network industry, each bringing to bear years of practical experience on every review. For more Lab Alliance information, including what it takes to become a member, go to www.networkworld.com/alliance.
