Free Tool of the Week: ScriptLogic PacketTrap IT Community Edition

For some time—since before it was a Quest Software product—I’ve had a soft spot for ScriptLogic’s network-monitoring and IT infrastructure solution, PacketTrap IT. So I made a point to visit with ScriptLogic’s PacketTrap team (namely, Jayson Gehri and Nick Cavalancia) recently at Microsoft TechEd. They brought me up to date on PacketTrap, including the revelation that ScriptLogic is introducing a free version of the product. And what could be better than a free version of PacketTrap? After all, according to Cavalancia, “This product rocks.”

PacketTrap IT provides centralized network monitoring, allowing the IT generalist and Microsoft technologist to solve problems associated with bandwidth, connectivity, network, and infrastructure performance that are often constant, time-consuming issues for IT departments. Through its central console, PacketTrap uses an agent-based approach to provide auto remediation; you can configure PacketTrap to automatically take actions in the event of a failure. The product boasts excellent live network mapping, as well as network performance baselining; the product learns your network’s performance idiosyncrasies to provide a malleable, realistic baseline. New to PacketTrap IT 6.0 is IPv6 support.

And now you can try it out for free, because the company has introduced a free version of PacketTrap IT that’s essentially the full version except with a limitation of 10 or fewer critical devices. If you’re an SMB, you should definitely give it a shot. The free version of PacketTrap IT lets you keep a close watch over devices in increasingly heterogeneous IT environments. This version also provides traffic monitoring for one device, and administrators can access a user community for support. The PacketTrap community, actually embedded in the product, contains a bevy of support opportunities, including various product resources.