Taking the silver award in our network monitoring category (in another repeat performance from last year) is the OptiView family from Fluke Networks. OptiView is a collection of network analyzers targeted at measuring and troubleshooting the enterprise network or specific links of it.

These hardware-based analyzers come in portable or rack-mounted versions; and they are available in an integrated model or as several different types meant to troubleshoot such specific network segments as wireless LANs, VoIP or Gigabit Ethernet. Once plugged into the network, the analyzers automatically begin to discover devices on the network, with no interaction required, by monitoring traffic and actively querying hosts. Networking professionals can immediately begin discovering problems like device misconfigurations, duplicate IP addresses, incorrect subnet masks, unresponsive routers and switch errors.

Not surprisingly, Product Leadership survey respondents rated OptiView highest for its ability to identify network problems; 73% of readers called the product good or excellent in that regard. Users were also impressed by the product's abilities in network integration and interoperability and by its capabilities in logging, monitoring and reporting.