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Along with a highly scalable agent-less architecture, it provides slick automated network discovery and mapping, comprehensive alerting and swift problem resolution.

The AdRem node-based licensing scheme has distinct advantages over sensor-based licenses which we've always found get used up all too quickly, especially if they are not carefully managed. NetCrunch is good value as a 125 node license is the equivalent of around 2,500 sensors and yet it costs less than £2,000.

Installation is another bonus as it only took us ten minutes to load NetCrunch onto a Windows Server 2012 R2 host and then run our first network discovery. Nothing escapes its gaze and it found all our Windows servers and workstations, our Active Directory domain controller, managed switches, NAS appliances, network printers and VMware systems.

We found the web console to be very well designed and the dashboard's Atlas screen provided a complete overview of our network devices. Using drag and drop widgets, Atlas offers at-a-glance status views with colour coded icons so problem areas can be spotted immediately.

AdRem's Monitoring Packs keep everything neat and tidy as they group together performance data and alerts for specific devices and services. These were assigned automatically during the discovery phase and we were presented with a selection for AD, DNS, Linux, VMware, Windows system monitoring and general node and service status.

Not only do the icons change colour to denote problems, but they also keep a running tally of the number of outstanding issues and severity levels for each Pack. A single click on a problem Pack reveals a drop-down list of affected systems which can be drilled into to identify root cause.

A good dashboard design is essential as it's all too easy to get buried in the depths of the product with no easy way back to the top level views. Not so with NetCrunch as no matter how deep we drilled down, the main Atlas screen was never more than a few clicks away.

There's more to the dashboard as its Top Charts tab shows customisable views of systems with the highest CPU, memory and storage utilisation, nodes with the most problems, plus separate graphs for switches and servers handling the most network traffic. If you have devices generating flow data such as NetFlow and sFlow, NetCrunch can receive this and then use it to create multiple graphs, with a breakdown of discovered applications, along with detailed flow analytics.

Virtualised environments are on AdRem's agenda as it can monitor Hyper-V and VMware hosts. For our ESXi host system it provided full performance stats, the status of each VM and options to add them to the Atlas dashboard as separate entities.

Each Monitoring Pack also includes default sets of alerting scripts which are easily customised to suit and it includes options for email, SMS and GSM devices. To prevent alert storms when, for example, a switch port fails, you can define connected nodes as children so that they won't send an alert if their parent node fails.

Actions make NetCrunch even more versatile because it can carry out a set of commands as a reaction to specific alerts. Basic actions include playing a sound or sending an email while control actions can run a program or script, reboot an errant system, pause, start or stop a Windows service and more.

NetCrunch from AdRem takes the pain out of network monitoring with one the most intuitive management consoles on the market. It offers a superb feature set, it scales well into enterprise environments and it is priced right for SMBs. NC

Product: NetCrunch 9
Supplier: AdRem Software
Web site: www.adremsoft.com
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Price: 125 nodes, from £1,950 excluding VAT