10th Annual Well-Connected Awards: Network and Systems Management

This category's winners and finalists span this gamut, from the most basic to the highly strategic. Some require the deep pockets and long-term commitment commonly associated with strategic applications, while others are more immediately available and useful, costing less than your daily Big Gulp to own and operate.

Categories:

Network Management Systems

WINNER: WhatsUp Gold 7.0. Ipswitch, (800) 793-4825, (781) 676-5700. www.ipswitch.com

When you think of low-priced network-management tools, Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold likely comes to mind. But if we told you Ipswitch won our Well-Connected Award for best network-management system, you might scratch your head. Consider that Ipswitch has continued to innovate while keeping WhatsUp's cost low. True, WhatsUp Gold isn't going to do everything, but what it does, it does reliably and without hassle.

FINALISTS: SiteScope 7.6. Mercury Interactive (formerly Freshwater Software), (800) 837-8911, (408) 822-5200. www.mercuryinteractive.com

Orion Network Performance Monitor 6.0. SolarWinds.Net, (918) 307-8100. www.solarwinds.net

Desktop ManagementWINNER: Altiris Client Management Suite 5.6. Altiris, (888) 252-5551, (801) 226-8500. www.altiris.com

Altiris' superbly integrated suite has lots of add-on modules topped with a cherry of a patch-management system. Altiris Client Management Suite's IIS and SQL vulnerability scanning keep you advised of poorly configured systems, while the patch manager helps you stay abreast of the flood of new patches for Windows desktops and servers. Finally, CMS' Web interface makes getting the big picture easy, while letting you drill down deep when you feel the need.

FINALISTS: LANDesk Management Suite 7. LANDesk Software, (800) 982-2130, (801) 208-1500. www.landesk.com

Marimba Desktop/Mobile Management 5.0. Marimba (now available as Marimba Client Management). (888) 800-5444, (650) 930-5282. www.marimba.com

Performance MonitoringWINNER: ProactiveNet 5.1. ProactiveNet, (877) 277-6686, (408) 935-6800. www.proactivenet.com

Performance management, which makes good use of SNMP, offers the quickest return on your management dollar. But SNMP will only get you so far, because proprietary agents and applications monitor the truly important business processes. ProactiveNet, also our product of the year in this core market, shines by presenting a total end-to-end view of how business services are delivered. If money is tight and you can choose only a single network management product, ProactiveNet is the one.

FINALISTS: NetVigil 3.6. Fidelia Technology, (888) FIDELIA, (609) 452-2225. www.fidelia.com

The Gomez Performance Network 4.0 and Last Mile URL Monitoring (version 4.1 now available). Gomez, (877) 372-6732, (781) 768-2100. www.gomez.com

Patch ManagementWINNER: Patch Manager 3.0. Ecora Software, (877) 923-2672, (603) 436-1616. www.ecora.com

Patch management is like wearing a life preserver on a speedboat. Not sexy ... until everyone around you is going down for the third time while you tread water. Ecora's Patch Manager keeps you afloat with consistently solid features and good reporting. Patch Manager is one of the elite few that offer rollback--the importance of being able to suck back patches that break systems cannot be overstated.

FINALISTS: BigFix Patch Manager 4.0. BigFix, (510) 652-6700. www.bigfix.com

PatchLink Update 5.0. PatchLink Corp., (888) 970-1025, (480) 970-1025. www.patchlink.com

Infrastructure Configuration ManagementWINNER: Formulator 200 3.2 (version 3.5 now available). Gold Wire Technology, (888) 585-9473, (781) 398-8800. www.goldwiretech.com

We can't help ourselves: We're control freaks with security on the brain, and Formulator fed our habits while delving deep into managing our network infrastructure. This appliance gathered, catalogued, compared and protected configurations for most of the stuff we have at the lab. In addition, we could keep tight tabs on who was doing what with our network devices through Formulator's audit trail, and in case of misguided changes, we could restore a working configuration in a jiffy.

FINALIST: DeviceAuthority. AlterPoint, (888) 228-3422, (512) 499-0904. www.alterpoint.com

Systems Management

WINNER: eQ Management Suite 2.0. Heroix Corp., (800) 229-6500, (617) 527-1550. www.heroix.comHeriox's eQ Management Suite clobbered systems problems for us. In addition to hunting and gathering data using agents, eQ offers useful suggestions. The well-designed interface gives you an overview into systems performance networkwide, while letting you publish custom reports to any number of constituencies.

FINALIST: OpticNerve 3.1 (version 4.1 now available). Oculan Corp., (877) 643-3294, (919) 534-0500. www.oculan.com

Bruce Boardman, executive editor of Network Computing, tests and writes about network management and systems. Write to him at [email protected].

PROACTIVENET 5.1. ProactiveNet, (877) 277-6686, (408) 935-6800. www.proactivenet.com

ProactiveNet's eponymous performance-management system has won a Well-Connected Award for the second year in a row--an unprecedented feat, but well-deserved thanks to its increasingly superior data collection, stability and usability. This product combines strategic monitoring of transactions and application performance with gritty fault diagnostics of system and network performance. As for data sources collected, diagnosed and reported on, we're talking client side, server side and everything in between--including SNMP, Oracle and SQL. Most important are ProactiveNet's built-in root-cause diagnostics and its ability to ratchet alerts down to a manageable level. It's not a perfect fix, and everything isn't wrapped up into a neat package. Rather, ProactiveNet makes realistic and, in our experience, accurate attempts to identify problems.