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Monitoring large networks can run into thousands of pounds, but Lansweeper Premium supports unlimited assets and yet costs a shade over £700 per year, and the licensing scheme is simpler to understand than competing products using sensor counts. Lansweeper considers each device as an asset regardless of how many of its components are being monitored.

Lansweeper is agentless and can monitor just about any network device you care to name. It augments these capabilities with a raft of extra features, including hardware and software inventory, AD management, software licensing compliance and automated software distribution.

If installation is anything to go by Lansweeper is a winner, as it took only ten minutes to load the software and run our first network discovery. Its smart web console opens with a dashboard overview of all discovered devices with a central bar graph breaking them down neatly into manufacturer categories.

Network scans require all relevant credentials to be supplied and these can be assigned to the various scan types. Scans can then be customised for different domains, workgroups or IP address ranges and scheduled to run at regular intervals.

The dashboard uses multiple widgets so we could customise our views and move them around to suit, using drag and drop. We added pie charts showing device type distributions plus tables for the last seen devices, Windows OS', Microsoft security advisories and more. Dashboard tabs are provided for quick views of servers along with related errors and details such as automatic services that have been stopped. All identified software and hardware is presented under separate tabs, and we were impressed with the volume of information extracted by Lansweeper.

Drilling down into each system provides extensive lists of hardware such as the CPU, memory, hard disks, NICS and so on. Software inventory is equally detailed and it provided us with a complete rundown of suites, applications, version numbers and installation dates.

The software inventory comes into its own for license management as we searched it for specific packages and added details of licenses purchased. The compliance tab lists all declared applications along with the number of licenses assigned, the number in use, and which systems they're running on.

Software is deployed to systems selected from the asset list and Lansweeper uses the appropriate scan credentials to access the local Task Scheduler. It's easy enough to use as you create new packages from the main console or download predefined ones from the Lansweeper web community site and decide when to run them.

Lansweeper is a real eye-opener for printer monitoring. We had HP's brand-new Colour LaserJet Enterprise M553dn on the network and Lansweeper used coloured bar graphs to show the remaining capacity for each toner cartridge and other consumables. For our Oki LED printer, we could see remaining capacities for toner colours, the four image drums, transfer belt and fuser. Lansweeper also displayed the total number of pages printed by both printers and their warranty status.

It handles virtualised environments equally well. We have Windows Hyper-V and VMware ESX systems in the lab and it showed all VMs loaded on them, their status, and the amount of assigned virtual memory for each instance.

If you want to keep a close eye on your IT assets then Lansweeper is a top choice as it's very easy to deploy and use. It's capable of providing a wealth of accessible information on any network system or device and its asset based licensing makes it one of the most affordable packages on the market. NC

Product: Lansweeper 5.2
Supplier: Hemoco bvba
Web site: www.lansweeper.com
Contact: +44 (0)203 695 7908
Price: Premium with unlimited assets is £727 per year excluding VAT