Dartware InterMapper review

Offices are more network-dependent than ever, so it's important to minimise downtime or prevent it completely. Karl Wright takes Dartware's InterMapper networking monitoring software out for a spin to see if it can help.

IT Pro Verdict

InterMapper is a comprehensive network monitoring program that makes it easy to see as soon as something goes wrong and which also gives you the data you need to monitor and analyse network performance.

InterMapper 5.4 is a network monitoring tool that provides constant, and instant, updates on the status of your network devices. Getting started is easy just run the auto discovery feature. The software polls the network, looking for devices that reply to standard PING/Echo and SNMP probes.

The devices it finds in this way are grouped according to subnet and arranged on the automatically-generated network map. If a device isn't found, you can add it yourself if you know its IP address. You can also manually group devices in ways that make sense to you. This helps you organise your network map in a way that matches the logical structure of your network. Since you can create sub-maps, it also helps to keep the interface tidy when dealing with large networks.

If you're not happy with the way the map looks, you can customise it. You needn't, for instance, use the default icons there are eleven icon sets to choose from. Plain as they are, however, the defaults are all clearly defined. If you customise, you have to remember what you used each icon type for. You can also automatically rearrange the way the map is laid out; you can group many devices together and even insert a background image, for instance a map of your building.

If you’re not happy with the way your network map looks, you can easily customise it with a variety of icon sets.

If you’re not happy with the way your network map looks, you can easily customise it with a variety of icon sets.

If you're not happy with the way your network map looks, you can easily customise it with a variety of icon sets.

Once you have your map, the software regularly polls the devices on the network and monitors network connections to give you real-time status information. If a device shows problems, for instance a high rate of packet loss, the software flags this up with a simple, visual alert on the map. For grouped devices, the map shows the status of the device that most requires attention.