Network management made affordable

Times are tough all over, and never is this more evident than when you’re selling IT solutions to small and midsize businesses. Increasingly, it’s an issue in the enterprise as well. Folks are being retrained to pinch pennies, and, hey, I can’t blame them. As a working IT service consultant, standing out in an increasingly growing crowd of nerds-for-hire requires that you deliver more value than the next guy.

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For this reason, I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to do the same things better while leaving less of a dent in my clients’ bottom lines. Network and systems management are always a sore point to nontechnical customers. Finding a way to install feature-rich tools without adding 20 percent, 30 percent, even 40 percent onto overall network software costs is a constant battle.

There are solutions, but not everything works for every customer, so I’m always looking for new talent. I recently tried two new packages with pleasant results: NetTools2 from AxoSoft and Breakout Software’s MonitorIT 5.2.

NetTools2 seemed to be a likely contender, given its “network monitoring” moniker, but I was especially attracted to its $39 per license cost structure. Unfortunately, NetTools2 didn’t give me everything I wanted. In fact, it looks more like a hacker’s toolbox masquerading as a network management tool. I think it makes a great addition to any network manager’s security arsenal, but at its core, it’s really just an enhanced suite of TCP/IP tools. In addition to Telnet, ping, WhoIs, and similar TCP/IP utilities, you’ll also find a port scanner, shared resource scanner, and name scanner enabling the tool to resolve the relationship between IP addresses and their host names.

I liked the IP Monitor utility, which lets administrators track the number of incoming TCP, UDP (User Datagram Protocol), and ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) packets on any given network node, and it can even graph the results. The Connection Monitor is another useful tool, allowing a user to monitor all open connections on a target computer. Connection Monitor can display all kinds of useful information here, including local ports, local IP address, the protocol in use, the remote IP address and remote port, and even an up/down status for the connection.

Although NetTools2 is a useful collection of TCP/IP utilities, it can’t really do the job of network monitoring on its own. For this reason, I was more pleased with MonitorIT 5.2. Although more expensive than NetTools2, this tool is definitely better-suited for being the foundation of a network monitoring scheme. One immediate reason is that MonitorIT includes an SNMP- (Simple Network Management Protocol) monitoring interface called SNMPWatch. This can bring back all the usual information on any SNMP-enabled server, workstation, or other network device using standard SNMP MIBs (Management Information Bases).

It also has a very nifty tool called ServerWatch. This utility lets administrators monitor servers running any operating system; it keeps a basic health picture of the server running on the basis of its scans for hardware failure or loss of IP services, such as HTTP, SMTP, DNS, SNMP or a number of others. Administrators can choose which services to monitor via a fairly intuitive if not overly slick interface. Very nice if your client needs one particular service more than another.

If you use SNMP counters or Windows OS counters, you can consolidate them in MonitorIT’s CounterWatch, which lets you build some really cool historic performance information. BreakoutSoft could do some work on its interface here but nothing that would condemn the tool as it stands. SyslogWatch does pretty much what its name implies: watching and managing messages from any Syslog servers on your network. Finally, MonitorIT allows users to create even more customized monitoring schemes by keying on specified OS events, Windows services, specific files, or even specific application processes.

MonitorIT really provides all the flexibility I need to tailor a network management solution based not only on my customer’s specific network layout but also on his or her most important business applications and network resources. True, it’s quite a bit more expensive than NetTools2; MonitorIT charges on the basis of total number of managed devices, with prices ranging from $35 to $100 per device. More devices bring the per-device cost down accordingly. But for a typical 20-user network with the usual complement of servers, switches, and routers, that’s still less than $2,000, a far easier sell than most network management tools, which can easily run more than $10,000 for similar functionality.

I’ve been reading quite a bit about how the focus on lowering costs is negatively impacting our industry. Although it’s probably true, I’ve been getting pretty tired of all the doom and gloom. It’s nice to see a few companies at least delivering competitive value while still managing to roll with the economy’s punches.