Platforms
Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT
Pros
Very professional, web-based graphs. Gives the user the ability to
download and view reports in PDF. You can drill down in the web for
more detailed reports. Great user management, allowing you to
restrict users so that they see only what they need to see. Concord
gives a free "Network Health Checkup." This is a great
try-before-you-buy program. This program can also interact with
probes and server-based devices to give a full trend analysis of your
network and servers.
Cons
Some people may get sticker-shock when they see the price. Licensing
is done on a per-element basis.
Platforms
Unix, Windows 9x/NT
Pros
An excellent product for use in capacity planning. Out of the box,
Trinagy supports 30, 60, and 90-day forecasts, among other
calculations. Its report viewer is written in Java, so it is usable
on most platforms. The report architecture is open, in that you can
build your own reports.
Cons
Requires two weeks of training to run and administer. The pricing
scheme is somewhat similar to eHealth's, since the size of the
database depends on how many devices you query, how long you keep
rate data around, etc. You can get more for less by tweaking polling
intervals and retention times.
Platforms
Most Unix platforms, Windows NT
Pros
Free, easy to set up and use, very well documented. In addition to
polling devices on your network, MRTG can receive input from non-SNMP
sources.
Cons
Have to install multiple packages, which may be difficult to do on
some platforms. For example, MRTG needs a specific SNMP Perl module
to perform all of its polling duties. Not very scalable.
Platforms
Most Unix platforms
Pros
Great tool that
picks up where MRTG leaves off. It uses RRDTool, the next-generation
version of MRTG.
Cons
Cricket is single-threaded, so collecting data from a good-sized
network can take a while, especially if you gather usage data
frequently. Having said that, it is fairly efficient, so you should
not see any problem for quite some time.
Platforms
Unix, Windows NT
Pros
Very flexible and comes with some great reporting right out of the
box.
Cons
Requires in-depth knowledge of network management and programming
(Perl) in order to customize it to do anything beyond its
out-of-the-box capabilities.
