Network Monitor..

Hi,

I'm looking at a network monitor, which needs to do the following:

Scan all 4 of our network ranges
Resolve IP to netbios name
Able to get information on XP, Vista and MAC machines
Either run constantly or schedule to run a few times a day.

Basically, i need this to run constantly or throughout specific time spans is because we are a 24 hour operation. All PC's have static IP's and some are not turned on until the night shift. I need to collate a list of all IP's that are in use and will make things easier when i have to distribute new PC's / printers etc.

There is a budget of £500 for this, so something farely decent would be nice - all i can find is free ones which are okay but wondered how much more i can get if i pay for something

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Comments

hypnotoad

Are your PCs on a Windows domain? If so, read on.

Spiceworks is free. Put it in a VM, let it run for a day in an IP range, then check out the data it gathers in to its database. The interface is polished and Ajax-ed. It is multiuser and has an active developers and community support.

It runs on a schedule, going out and scanning IP ranges for devices that either respond to WMI or SNMP requests (you specify credentials and/or community names). It gathers the kinds of things you need, including PC hostname, and anything you could want to know about a Windows machine (if they are on a domain).

We use it to get lists of software installed (not just windows updates, ALL software), HD space, memory, serial number, processor type, system model, alerts. It goes out, finds our printers, switches, and PCs. It even has a built-in helpdesk and asset documentation tool, so you can make notes on your systems and it will populate a database.

The only complaint I have is that it seems to be kind of sluggish when the database gets big. For this reason, I run multiple instances, each in it's own VM, and only scan the subnets that i'm interested in, as some of our 20 subnets don't have any PCs that I am responsible for. Spiceworks 3.0 was released this week is supposed to have significant performance improvements over the last 2.x version. Haven't tried it though.

Hope this helps,
NL