Best Network Management Software

Hi All,

Iam having to compare the following products for evaluation:

SNMPc Solarwinds Ciscoworks

Are there any recomendations you can make please.

Gaz

Reply to
Gary
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WhatsUp.....

No it's called WhatsUp Professional,

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Brandon

Reply to
brandonaralph

I've used solarwinds orion, tivoli netwview (hp openview), ciscoworks

2000 and whats up gold/professional (WUG). I never used Ciscoworks beyond basic configuration archiving and some monitoring and I despise netview/openview so I wont say anything about them. I am currently evaluating WUG and Orion again in my new position and have both running on my work PC.

The following is opinion only:

Solarwinds and WUG do slightly different things. Both will monitor but WUG does the best at responding. Depending on the complexity of your network and how you have the maps set up, it seems to be the fastest to respond to an outage. I had maps that went 3-4 layers deep. The nice thing is, you can set each map to a different "scan schedule." I would have my network devices (at the bottom layer) scan every 60 seconds. The 3 layers above would scan every 20 seconds. Since only the network devices generated traffic, the 20 second scan only ate up CPU cycles while it scanned itself. (I hope that makes sense). It has very easy to configure alerts (emails, pages, etc). The problem with WUG is that its made for basic monitoring of devices and some services. I wanted to monitor bandwidth so I ended up with MRTG/RDTOOL and then some additional tools when it wasnt satisfying me. It got rather sloppy. I also didnt much care for the way I needed to have the map loaded on the desktop for the program to run. Its just annoying. You may be able to load it as a service but I don't like to be forced into mucking around like that.

Solarwinds on the other hand monitors both status and utilization. It looks outstanding on a web page and the reports are fantastic. The downside is; its clunky as hell to configure. You need to add devices and services (volumes, interfaces, etc) in one program, then configure the maps in another. You might work on a map linking 2 items and realize your not monitoring something. You would then have to shut down the mapmaker program, start up the system manager, add the interface, then reopen mapmaker. Orion feels like it was slapped together from 10 different solarwinds engineer tools. The documentation is mediocre and its a pain to get the web pages set up exactly as you want it. It uses IIS which bothers me. I often want to have something running on IIS for other purposes. WUG runs on its own proprietary web service so I can have both up at once.

Hav> Hi All,

Reply to
Nick

.... and you forgot about one more - netcruch from AdRem. It's, for sure worth to see -

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dave

Reply to
dave

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