NetSuite Professional Audit is part of the company's "Network Design Process," which formalizes the design process and network maintenance. It is characterized by five steps: discovery, design, simulation, documentation and rediscovery. Audit performs the discovery and rediscovery phases of this process.

After Audit has finished, the design component lets you create a logical network diagram based on the network you have. You can experiment with proposed solutions to your networking problems or fantasize about what it would be like if you had a bigger budget.

When the design is complete, it is sent to a part of the NetSuite Toolkit, called the Simulation Gateway. Here the behavior of the proposed network is analyzed to see if it solves your problem (and doesn't introduce others). The NetSuite Toolkit can document the newly designed network and generate floor plans, so you can convert the logical network into a physical one. It also performs customized modeling of physical devices and can generate IP addresses and netmasks, allowing for subnet management.

I installed Audit on a Compaq Presario Pentium 120 with 96 MB of RAM, running Windows NT 4.0 Server, and on a Dell Dimension XPS Pentium 90 with 32 MB of RAM, running Windows95. In my testing, Audit discovered the existence of Unix, Windows NT and NetWare file servers on the local segment, infrastructure devices like Cisco routers, and the network monitors that could speak SNMP. It recorded this information in a discovery database and displayed it on the screen.

You can run the network discovery feature as often as you like, so that it records discoveries according to how often your network landscape changes. This is probably the most useful feature (if you aren't using the rest of the Network Design Process) after the actual device discovery. You can compare a discovery with earlier discoveries or with a previously created design.

Another notable feature is SoftProbes. When you purchase NetSuite Professional Audit, you'll receive an SNMP probe and have access to an IPX probe if you have a Novell NetWare client installed. You can purchase the Microsoft Systems Management Server probe and the HP OpenView probe separately. New probes expand upon Audit's discovery capabilities for new network management paradigms and network protocols.

Finally, the files containing the saved discoveries are created as Microsoft Access database files. The discovered information, such as network address, installed operating system and any node-specific information, is available to any other application that utilizes data in Access format.

Jeremy Impson is a freelance writer based in Syracuse. He can be reached at jdimpson@syr.edu.