To categorize the numerous asset-management offerings this past year, we turned our testing efforts toward three disciplines: inventory, software distribution and software metering. Although we found products that exhibit best-of-class functionality in each area, we were hoping to find a product that stood out in all three. Some products came close, but asset-management nirvana has not yet been reached.

This year our choice for top asset-management product goes to MainControl MC/EMPower 2.3. MainControl's offering provides cradle-to-grave tracking of assets and even tracks specific components including, memory, hard drives and CPUs. As an added benefit, it can leverage existing information from a centralized database via third-party inventory scanning agents.

Finalists in this category are Microsoft Corp.'s Systems Management Server (SMS) and Tivoli Systems' Tivoli Enterprise. Both solutions boast strong software-delivery architectures; Tivoli leverages its common framework, and SMS offers a powerful WAN-bandwidth-control mechanism, which can reduce the reduce the impact software distribution can have on your network.

--Bruce Boardman

Enterprise Systems Management Framework

Winner

Tivoli Enterprise, Tivoli Systems, (800) 2-TIVOLI, (512) 436-8000 www.tivoli.com

Finalists

Unicenter TNG 2.1, Computer Associates, (800) 225-5224, (516) 342-5224 www.cai.com ProVision, PLATINUM technology, (800) 442-6861 www.platinum.com

Award: Enterprise System Management Framework

Centralized enterprise-wide management is the promise these behemoths make, but shelling out the dough to fulfill that promise will probably make you cringe. And don't be fooled into thinking that the costs end with the sticker shock--the implementation and ongoing support costs will really set you back. For the last 12 months we've drilled down into the details of enterprise systems management, covering eight systems management disciplines over five different reviews. Along the way, we tested solutions from 16 different vendors.

This year our enterprise systems management framework choice is Tivoli Systems' Tivoli Enterprise. We particularly like Tivoli's implementation approach. There's no doubt that implementation and ongoing management are significant cost areas that can be streamlined. And we believe that controlling project creep and clearly identifying goals are crucial capabilities that many management vendors overlook. Tivoli Enterprise takes a structured approach--documenting, in detail, the architectural and procedural imperatives needed to cross the finish line. Tivoli also benefits from a very active and vocal user community that helps to keep the company honest and on track. And Tivoli boasts the best collaborative support from third parties; though some of this was inherited along with NetView, IBM's former network management platform.

The finalists in the caward category are Computer Associates International's Unicenter TNG and PLATINUM technology's ProVision. Computer Associates has made great strides in the areas of platform and application-management support. But we find that Unicenter TNG lacking in implementation structure when compared to Tivoli Enterprise. PLATINUM's ProVision also showed improvements by adding a common GUI and common framework in the long promised POEMS (PLATINUM Open Enterprise Management Services) framework.

--Bruce Boardman

Network Management Platform

Winner

Tivoli NetView 5.1, Tivoli Systems, (800) 2-TIVOLI, (512) 436-8000 www.tivoli.com

Finalists

Spectrum Enterprise Manager 5.0, Cabletron Systems, (603) 332-9400 www.cabletron.com The Kinnetics Network Management Appliance, Loran, (800) 563-1178, (613) 723-7505 www.loran.com

Award: Network Management Platform

"Same old, same old" is the best way to describe the network management platform space this year. Overall, we find that these systems still require quite a bit of work to create useful setups. And while out-of-the-box third-party support is better, in order to get the latest MIBS you'll still need to place a call to your infrastructure vendor.

Tivoli Systems's NetView is this year's winner in this category. NetView ships ready to work, with included tools to calculate utilization, plus it lets you group of devices by infrastructure type and capture Common Information Model (CIM) data from Windows98 desktops.

Our finalists in this category are Cabletron Systems' Cabletron Spectrum Enterprise and Loran's The Kinnetics Network. This year Cabletron Spectrum Enterprise gained several nifty features, including a bundle of third-party management modules. These modules can manage Cabletron equipment as well as other vendors' equipment, including Cisco and 3Com. We particularly liked Spectrum's deterministic alerting model, which applies intelligence to the suppressing of SNMP alerts and alarms.

Perhaps the most unique network management platform we tested this year was Loran's Kinnetics. Kinnetics is very easy to get up and running. And its Web-enabled GUI--which is engineered to run well over dial-up links to a back-end appliance--was as easy to setup as plugging it in. But the biggest promise of Kinnetics is its port-level mapping between infrastructure devices. While still maturing during our testing, this product holds a big promise to be a very useful network-management tool.

--Bruce Boardman

Performance Management

Winner

HP OpenView MeasureWare, Hewlett-Packard Co., (800) 752-0900 www.openview.hp.com

Finalists

Unicenter TNG 2.1, Computer Associates, (800) 225-5224, (516) 342-5224 www.cai.com ProVision, PLATINUM technology, (800) 442-6861 www.platinum.com

Award: Performance Management

Monitoring the performance of an operating system requires diagnostic and analytical tools. Our winner in this category is Hewlett-Packard Co.'s HP OpenView MeasureWare. HP bundles a collection of point products that not only offer strong tracking, troubleshooting and network traffic tools, but also show some of the best out-of-the-box functionality we have ever tested. PerfView, GlancePlus and Service Reporter run without an over-arching common framework, but don't suffer from a lack of integration, as they all share data. Service Reporter, in particular, was a pleasure to use. Within minutes we had it up creating Web-based reports on server performance.

Taking a very different approach, our finalists Computer Associates International's Unicenter TNG and PLATINUM technology's ProVision, package their performance management along with their common frameworks. Unicenter TNG Performance Management offers very flexible performance-management definitions, and is moving to extend this model with self-adjusting knowledge agents with its just released Nugent Agents technology.

With ProVision, PLATINUM offers a strong set of tools that benefit from the company's long-time best-of-breed performance tool experience. By using a form follows function approach, PLATINUM delivers a tool that assists a systems administrator. It makes getting at the right diagnostics, and making the right decisions easier.

--Bruce Boardman

Protocol Analyzer

Winner

HP Internet Advisor ATM, Hewlett-Packard Co., (800) 452-4844 www.hp.com/go/internetadvisor

Finalists

Sniffer Pro Network Analyzer 2.1 (now shipping 2.5), Network Associates, (800) SNIFFER, (408) 988-3832 www.nai.com DominoGigabit, Wavetek Wandel Goltermann, (800) 729-9441, (919) 941-5730 www.wg.com

Award: Protocol Analyzer

ATM is finally coming of age and so have a number of ATM protocol analyzers. For those that desire an all-in-one self-contained unit, our winner in this category, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Internet Advisor for ATM, is hard to beat. The Windows95-based interface plus a revamped set of menus and displays is a welcome relief from the Smalltalk-based Internet Advisor of old.

The Internet Advisor ATM provides extensive real-time error and cell statistics at the various ATM layers, including line-code violations, HEC errors, overall utilization, idle and busy-cell count, and utilization and throughput by individual Virtual Path/Virtual Circuit pairs. The unit can even substitute for a fiber cable tester in a pinch, having a built-in capability to measure the optical power of its ATM connection.

Internet Advisor ATM has recently added the capability to perform real-time capture filtering inside AAL5 PDUs as used by LANE (LAN Emulation), allowing you to filter on Layer 3 IP addresses just like a traditional LAN protocol analyzer. Captured LANE data can then be viewed as cells or frames, with full 7-layer decoding for the latter. Those of us familiar with traditional LAN analyzers will feel right at home.

--Scott Haugdahl