Mechanics who diagnose and fix Airbus aircraft have specific tools for fixing the engines. Mechanics for Boeing aircraft have somewhat different tools. Even United Airlines and American Airlines have somewhat different tools and test equipment for working on a particular model of aircraft.

You can view your own network in the same way. Your company's tools and test equipment might be very different from another company's, even though the two companies' networks might bear more than a slight resemblance. Getting the right tool for the job is a matter of judging your company's specific network needs (and budget) and finding solutions that meet your requirements.

In that sense, we decided to take a roundup look at a set of diverse tools to help you find the right one for your network. Our eclectic mix consisted of WhatsUp Gold 8.0, from Ipswitch; UniCenter Application Performance Monitor 3.5, from Computer Associates; VitalStats 2.0 from WebMetrics; PacketLogic 3.2.3 from NetIntact; NetCrunch 2.3 from AdRem Software; and OpalisRobot 4.0 from Opalis Software.

There are no winners or losers in this review, just good points and bad points, plus the realization that sometimes the best crowbar is a hammer, and sometimes the best hammer is a crowbar. These tools are just different ways of getting different jobs done.

WhatsUp Gold

WhatsUp Gold is a highly useful tool on small and midsize networks. Its quick and accurate discovery process and informative status and availability charts are a godsend to administrators who've struggled to improve availability and uptime by hand, without an automated monitoring tool.

WhatsUp Gold's designers have made several improvements to the monitoring and alerting tool since we last reviewed it in the fall of 2000. WhatsUp Gold now can restart failed Windows services if you instruct it to monitor those services, can export data in XML  format and has a user interface that's more responsive and more intuitive.

But there are still some limitations. WhatsUp Gold doesn't offer graphical Management Information Base walking, nor does it offer usage baselines for device behaviors. WhatsUp Gold now sports two corrective action features. WhatsUp Gold has the ability to restart failed Windows services and it can also run a user-specified external program when a problem occurs. However, Ipswitch's menus and User's Guide refer to running the external program as a "program notification," terminology we found rather unintuitive and obscure.

Furthermore, its network map lacks symbols for such basic items as switches, DSU/CSUs and telco interfaces, and it has a Windows NT icon but not a Windows 2000 icon. Choosing the tool's Status display produces a garish, uninformative window that only becomes partly useful when you put the tool into "mini-status" mode. WhatsUp Gold then shrinks into a color-coded (green means OK, red means problems) status bar that you can move to the corner of your screen.

WhatsUp Gold is simple and uncluttered, has a good autodiscovery function, uses Internet Control Messaging Protocol (ICMP ) pings at a time interval you specify in a straightforward to check the network's health and produces helpful reports. If you prefer, WhatsUp Gold can use IPX or NetBIOS packets to monitor a device.

Autodiscovery, which Ipswitch terms SmartScan, is impressive. It uses SNMP requests and data from router tables to find network devices quickly and accurately. In our tests, SmartScan turned its hierarchical connectivity data into a set of separate subnet maps instead of drawing one map containing all devices. An alternate but equally accurate discovery process uses a configurable combination of Network Neighborhood exploitation, ICMP pings, Hosts file entries and Windows Registry data.

At intervals, WhatsUp Gold polls the network to collect device status information. It also tracks network traffic associated with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), HTTP, DNS, FTP, POP3, Internet Message Access Protocol , telnet and other common services. It includes ping, port scanning and throughput utilities.

The software can notify administrators of problems via e-mail or pager. Setting up an e-mail alert that told us of unavailable devices and showing the last several lines of the Windows NT event logs took just a few minutes to configure. The product's network event and statistics reports are useful for tracking device and service outages.

The interactive Web page interface was a joy to use and encompassed all the functions of the Win32 native interface. For example, it let us check the status of any network device from a remote location, using only a dial-up connection and Web browser.

WhatsUp Gold has come a long way from its simple beginnings as a freeware download. It's a reliable monitoring tool that administrators of small and midsize networks can quickly begin using without a lot of training.

Bottom Line

WhatsUp Gold 8.0

Company: Ipswitch, (781) 676-5700 Cost: Starts at $1,090 with annual service agreement. Pros: Accurate discovery of devices; useful status charts. Cons: Can’t run a program or script to correct a problem. Best suited for: A small to midsize company whose network administrators prefer simplicity.

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Application Performance Monitor

Tracking application response times with CA's Application Performance Monitor (APM) is more accurate and less labor-intensive than using a stopwatch. It's an excellent tool for measuring formal service-level agreements regarding acceptable response times. Less formally, it's a good way to keep developers honest when a software vendor or group of your programmers has promised, for example, sub-2-second response times for a new application or transaction subsystem.APM, a UniCenter component that's separately available from CA, monitors response times by detecting the beginning and ending network events associated with a transaction. Its agent module collects the benchmark timings in a local data store throughout the day. Periodically, all the agents send the resulting statistics to the central APM Manager. Except for Web-based applications, you have to install the agent module on each client. Fortunately, the agent installation is simple and takes just a few moments. For Web-based applications, APM works on the Web server to gather response time data. CA ships an extensive knowledgebase of transaction detection triggers for applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SAP/R3, but you'll have to get your hands dirty with the technical details of your company's network transaction messages if you want to monitor customized software. We found setting up knowledgebase entries for unique transactions to be technically challenging at first, but fairly easy once we understood the process. The lack of good documentation on the topic means you'll suffer through some trial and error before you get it right.

APM also includes a Transaction Server module for recording and later replaying a transaction's events and messages. Transaction Server stores transactions in the form of JavaScript or VBScript programs, whose replay you can schedule to occur when you like.

APM's Web Reporting Server can produce several browser-based reports in four categories: Alerts, Applications, Clients and Servers. Different types of reports are available - Enterprise Reports summarize data from all agents; Group Reports reveal results for certain computers; Host Reports show information from a specific agent; and User Reports provide information based on Windows logon user names. In addition to the pre-configured reports in each category, the Web Reporting Server has report templates that make creating your own custom reports a breeze. Scheduling the production of the reports is similarly easy.

APM also includes a handy Data Viewer diagnostic tool for connecting to an agent to see real-time transaction statistics.

Bottom Line

UniCenter Application Performance Monitor 3.5

Company: Computer Associates, (800) 225-5224 Cost: Starts at $7,500 per server. Pros: Excellent, customizable reports. Cons: Doesn’t detect JavaScript operations. Best suited for: A company with in-house programmers who need to make applications more responsive.

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VitalStats

With one minor exception, VitalStats was a no-brainer to use in the lab. A service, VitalStats consists of WebMetrics (the company) monitoring one or more of your Internet-accessible servers for problems with network connectivity, CPU usage, memory and hard disks. In our tests, we used the service to keep an eye on a Microsoft Internet Information Service machine.

A VitalStats software agent that you install on a Web server communicates at 5-minute or 1-minute intervals with one of WebMetrics' points of presence. We tested the 5-minute monitoring service. The software agent sends server utilization statistics to WebMetrics, which collects the utilization figures and presents them as graphical charts and log files that you can view when you log on to WebMetrics' Web site.

If the central WebMetrics monitoring software detects a problem, such as server resource overutilization or communications failure, it sends e-mails or it can page you.

An e-mailed alert might contain the message, "Page download time exceeded timeout of 30 sec" or "Can't get page http://(your IP address)/Scripts/vital2000.v2.0.exe," followed by a traceroute display of the network links between WebMetrics' site and yours. At its Web site, WebMetrics can show you performance graphs for specific time periods.

We encountered a minor stumbling block during installation. WebMetrics sends a software agent to each new customer, and a network administrator installs the agent by placing it in the Web server's Scripts directory and making that directory Internet-accessible. Unfortunately, we had "hardened" the Web server by installing Microsoft's URLScan, applying all current security patches and deleting unnecessary directories. We had to put the software agent in a new directory, publish the new directory on the Internet via Windows Server's Internet Services Manager and, after logging on to WebMetrics' main site, configure WebMetrics' central monitoring software to "see" the new directory.

Bottom Line

VitalStats 2.0

Company: WebMetrics, (877) 524-8299 Cost: Standard service (monitors every 5 minutes) is $60/ month/monitored server; Gold service (monitors every minute) is $180/month/ monitored server. Pros: Lets you outsource network monitoring to a third party. Cons: You still have to be expert enough to fix the problems that VitalStats detects. Best suited for: A company that prefers to outsource network monitoring.

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WebMetrics offers specific services for Web servers, database servers and application servers. Customers don't install a software agent for application servers. Instead, WebMetrics tests for server availability by sending "keep alive" network messages to the server and noting the server's response. WebMetrics says its GlobalWatch network is in more than 17 cities worldwide, with POPs throughout North America, Asia and Europe.