The IT Trench Warfare Blog ...Tips, Tricks, & References to Simplify your life in the IT Trenches

In the world of network management, you’ve got to have information.  You have to know how your servers are performing, how traffic is flowing, and keep on top of the ever changing state of application and services availability. Knowing what’s happing will let you discover potential issues before the become trouble tickets and allow you to plan capacity, utilization, and availability appropriately. To that end there exist a horde of cross-network management and monitoring tools from Tivoli, Open View, Microsoft System Center, and many other smaller vendors. Being a huge fan of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and always on the look out for simple but effective tools to help make life in the trenches a little easier, I recently happened upon a little known tool called pt360.  “pt360” is the freeware version of Packet Trap Perspective from Quest Software.  Quest makes some really great enterprise software and their free tool is just about as good and well worth the trouble. 

pt360 has most of the tools that you would need to discover and monitor your network as well as a great dashboard feature that I like a lot but rather than describe everything in a 4 page diatribe I think some pictures will do the trick.

 

 

Now obviously Quest isn’t going to give away the house but the basic toolset that they do give you is great for smaller organizations that just don’t have the need, IT expertise, or budget for the best tools.  Setup takes just a few minutes and the app is very responsive.  It doesn’t have all the rich integration features of Packet Trap Perspective or similar tools but it also doesn't take 2 days to install, dedicated servers, 3 days to configure, and licensing from hell.  So you be the judge as to whether this little freeware app can work for you. 

Download pt360 here

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