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F E A T U R E

Review: SolarWinds Sheds Light on Networks

July 22, 2002
By Bruce Boardman

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	In this article
	Introduction
	SolarWinds.Net SolarWinds Engineers Edition
	More Products Reviewed
	Executive Summary
	How We Tested
	Report Card

We all have our pet tools--the analyzers, ping monitors and TFTP Swiss Army knives that are always the first line of defense. Not everything has to be strategic to be useful; in fact, some might say there is an inverse relationship between strategy and utility--and the products we tested for this review are nothing if not useful.

We gathered a sampling of these network-management gadgets in our Syracuse University Real-World Labs®. We scouted out tools that are used to diagnose and fix problems. We required that the products be the kind you'd stick on your desktop or laptop to quickly get a picture of how your network and its services are doing.

Of course, there really isn't a perfect, one-size-fits-all network tool. But sometimes it seems as though the large, strategic (expensive) products try to make all the world's networking problems fit into a single mold, solvable by a single megatool (for a look at strategic network-management packages, see "Orchestream Conducts PBNM With Precision," and "Peregrine Perches Atop the Pack."). The toolbox products, on the other hand, range in functionality and try to find the right lever to pry the lid off problems.

We loaded up our lab with Castle Rock Computing's SNMPc Workgroup Edition; Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold; MRTG, provided through GNU General Public License; SolarWinds.Net's SolarWinds Engineers Edition; Visualware's VisualRoute; and WildPackets' EtherPeek NX with Network Tools.

These packages range from being like the Swiss Army knives, with lots of functional utilities, to complex systems that monitor performance and faults on your network. But they all leverage the power of desktop PCs and are inexpensive or, in one case, free. These tools do many of the same things more complex systems do, such as discovering, mapping, monitoring and reporting, but they focus on fixing problems now rather than implementing a total solution.

Network Management Toolbox Features

Click here to enlarge

Down to Brass Tacks

All these products rock--there's no heavy front-end lifting to implement them, and they get down to business with a payback faster than you can spell "ROI." We don't hesitate to recommend any of them. When it comes to a network manager's day-to-day struggle to survive, these are what keep you going.

Picking a winner may seem a bit like comparing apples and oranges--after all, is a hammer better than a wrench? We'll admit that your mileage may vary, but if we could take only one set of tools to a deserted network island, we'd load up our raft with SolarWinds.Net's networking tools. It has the kitchen sink and now our Editor's Choice award too. This mixed bag of disparate tools covers the entire gambit of our modified FCAPS (see "How We Tested," for how we fudged fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security) at a reasonable price. SolarWinds.Net's product is a tool for all reasons.

MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) gets our Best Value award, having a sum total price tag of a big fat nada, zip, zero (under GNU). It is a hunter, gatherer and grapher, spewing SNMP performance statistics into HTML, and it has spawned an active Internet community, which adds lots of value.