Pros & Cons
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- Good feature range for the free version, ability to use both SNMP and WMI for discovery, well-thought-out user interface, good additional features in for-cost "Pro" version, including specific support for Microsoft application management and Cisco device management.
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- Weak on reporting features, no hardware or software asset management; no helpdesk features.
pt360 Tools Suite Free Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Linux |
| OS Compatibility: | Mac OS |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
You don't have to break the bank to know what's happening on your network. PacketTrap's free pt360 Tool Suite is an impressive collection of network monitoring tools that shares the freebie space with Spiceworks 2.0. The pt360 suite, however, has more tools for actually fixing problems and is more network-centric, so it should appeal to a wider variety of IT managers.
You can download the pt360 Tool Suite from PacketTrap's Web site, and if network management is in any way important to you, I recommend that you just do it. The software installs as a Windows application, but checking it out takes only 20 minutes and, since there's no money required, you really have nothing to lose. There's also a pt360 Tool Suite Pro version, which costs $1,499 and has several additional features that I'll cover below.
Installation is fast, though pt360 took quite a bit longer to complete the discovery phase than Spiceworks did; it also reported back more information. Once installed, pt360 opens immediately in a central dashboard window from which users can access all of the suite's tools and data windows via an icon toolbar at the top. It's worth noting early that pt360 and Spiceworks share another similarity: the amount of thought and effort that went into the user interface. Most freebie or open-source tools of this kind have a real designed-by-techs-for-techs look and feel, but both of these show real thought and consideration on the GUI side, in terms of not just organization but also ease of use.
In pt360's case, that means you can arrange your screen, which defaults to a simple tool menu with an open canvas for your data views, so that your most important data views show at front and center; or you can reorganize the whole screen by moving to a tabbed view rather than a series of windows. The freebie version allows only a single new tab; the Pro version lets you organize your views with unlimited tabs—so you can have tabs with device views based on geographic location, user group or department, for instance. In either version, you can also add widget-type tools, similar to Vista's Sidebar gadgets, just by activating them from the main menu bar. Each widget can show a specific set of data points from pt360's continuous monitoring—this could be basic up-down data obtained by IP address pings or more specific system health parameters obtained via SNMP.
Widgets are individually configurable, enabling you to assign views to just those SNMP or WMI data points in which you're interested. So an important server, say, could be watched for disk space usage and its heat threshold, but not necessarily for CPU utilization. Getting this view is as easy as accessing the SNMP scanning widget, referring back \to the correct SNMP community strings or WMI log-in credentials, and then selecting those criteria you'd like to monitor. In my testing, the widget configured all this via a wizard, then made sure all the credentials were correct with an access attempt. After that, it displayed the data. From here, I had the option of killing this view when I was done or moving it to the dashboard page as a permanent resident. All very slick.
There was one widget that I didn't understand at first: a Web view that displays a specific Web page on a schedule. Turns out this is a great little tool for checking the integrity of your Web server or any of the slew of Web-based collaboration and SaaS software that folks are deploying these days. The widget loads each site, each individual page of multipage sites, and records whether everything loaded properly or not. That's a useful heads-up for when the company Web site (or just an internal SharePoint site) dies. Each widget comes with its own set of tools and a configuration wizard.—
Monitoring with pt360
The monitoring tools are straightforward. Because pt360, again just like Spiceworks, is agentless, you'll need to enter required security information for it to gain access to password-protected devices. Unlike Spiceworks, which is really all about WMI, pt360 can monitor using either SNMP or WMI, as well as SSH and FTP, so make sure you've got a list of log-in credentials and community strings when you're setting up these tools. What's nice here is that PacketTrap was smart enough to create a central administration area where you can enter all this information once and have it accessed by any widget or monitoring tool you decide to use. This is way better than entering the same set of IP address and WMI log-in creds across five or six configuration wizards. There's even a little "recently used" drop-down menu that remembers the last few IP addresses and subnets you've accessed and lets you select them across different tools with just a mouse click.
A feature I really like is pt360's ability to integrate views with XML-capable open-source monitoring applications. Out in the real world, for example, I've got several boxes and customer sites that are monitored by MRTG and Nagios. Instead of having to reinvent those wheels inside of pt360, the Integration feature lets me access those boxes directly and view what they're monitoring live within pt360.—
Spiceworks vs. pt360
All these monitoring tools put this part of the pt360 Tool Suite on the same street as Spiceworks, except that pt360 supports more than just WMI. What Spiceworks has that pt360 doesn't is (1) much more attention paid to reporting, (2) a built-in helpdesk that really works for SMBs, and (3) the ability to take its device information–gathering capabilities and turn them into a quality asset management and tracking tool.
What pt360 has that Spiceworks doesn't is a series of tools that let admins interact directly with the network to investigate any problems reported by the management tools. Traceroute and Whois are among the basics, but pt360 also does a lot of work with advanced ping operations, including a graphical representation and the ability to schedule a series of ping scans across a range of IP addresses with results saved in a log file.
I also like the MAC address scan, though this will require you to have some kind of record of your local MAC addresses. It's a good way to find unauthorized devices, however. It even lets you look up the manufacturer of any MAC address recorded in the scan. The SNMP scan can give quite a bit of device detail, but again, you'll need to enter the appropriate community string information in the central administration view. There's a TFTP server, so you can upload firmware flashes from a central site, and a Wake-on-LAN feature, so you can monitor sleeping devices, too.
The pt360 Pro version offers a few tools that the freebie version doesn't, including a DNS Audit feature that can scan all the registered members of your domain or workgroup (via NetBIOS). There's also a Syslog Server and a whole slew of configuration editing and firmware downloading and management tools specific to Cisco devices, among them a password decrypter that's undoubtedly useful for folks that tend to forget their log-ins. Pro users also get three application monitoring tools: one each for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and Active Directory. Last, there's a feature called Traffic Jam that lets administrators define a load of network traffic and aim it at a specific device. It's not as sophisticated a load tester as Ixia's IxChariot or other tools in that class, but it's a handy tool for finding out whether a certain device is performing up to snuff or not. Fortunately, the free version of pt360 has 30-day trials of most of these Pro-only features, so you can try them out and decide if they're worth the extra $1,500.
Overall, I liked Packet Trap's pt360 Tools Suite better than Spiceworks. I found the user interface to be a little more intuitive, and the device discovery feature gave me much more the first time around than Spiceworks' equivalent did. I do think pt360's Pro version is a little overpriced, but for those who want the advanced network tools and especially the application and Cisco management tools, I would recommend investing in it nonetheless. If pt360 had an asset management and reporting tool that was equal to what you find in Spiceworks, it'd be a slam-dunk winner. As it stands, pt360 is a better choice for folks who concentrate solely on network management and problem solving, whereas Spiceworks is the better all-around choice for someone who has to manage and track an SMB network from A to Z.
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Final Thoughts
pt360 Tools Suite Free
PacketTrap's pt360 Tools Suite beta looks like a direct competitor to Spiceworks 2.0. Though both are essentially free products, the pt360 Suite concentrates more heavily on network diagnostics and management, whereas Spiceworks is more about asset management. Still, p360's free version is surprisingly feature rich and offers an intuitive, carefully developed user interface.