Our team currently uses a combination of HP Openview, VitalNet, and other software for our network "health" information and alerting. In other enterprises (Ameritech) I have previously used Concord (http://www.concord.com/) products to the same effect. All of these solutions provide useful statistics (but not mapping) and are limited their ability to detect and deal with dependencies.
There are applications which provide a map display such as Don envisions, some in real-time, these are generally among the more expensive products. I have been working on a limited open-source application (http://sourceforge.net/projects/netmap/) providing some of this functionality, and the graphing and display issues involved are just the tip of the iceberg.
There are several map-capable products that could be considered, I've heard good things about these three:
- http://www.ipswitch.com/Products/WhatsUp/monitoring.html
- http://www.lanware.net/NetworkManagment.asp
- http://www.intermapper.com/
The most recent NWFusion buyers guide for Network Monitoring I can find (http://www.nwfusion.com/bg/netmon/netmon.jsp) was published in 1999, and is sorely out of date. They still list NetMetrix and other non-existent products, and there are probably many new products in this arena which are not included. Perhaps there are other, better, resources for locating vendors?
