From PC Magazine /
September 18, 2000, By Jan Ozer and Matthew Smith
Editors' rating: 5 star
With netViz 3D (£1399 list), netViz Corp. adds
3-D sizzle to its network visualization program. For collecting data about any
computer, network, or telephony-related equipment for technical support,
training, procurement, and planning, netViz is simply nonpareil.
The product is a data-driven network visualization
tool. For example, when you drag a computer icon into the diagram, you can
enter information regarding processor, speed, OS, installed programs, or any
other data points you select, and this information is then stored in netViz's
database for mining or exporting to other database formats. Alternatively, you
can populate a netViz project with data from an external database.
netViz ships with graphics files for many products, so
a graphic of your Cisco 3620 router looks like a Cisco 3620 router. And you can
customize links by color and thickness, so your interregional T3 connection
looks fatter than the connections for 56K modems used in the laptops of your
sales reps.
You can import files as backgrounds from any diagram,
such as a Visio drawing of your office layout, or use one of the many supplied
world, national, or regional maps. When you're done, you can view the project
from the top down, double-clicking your way down to a laptop in Phoenix, for
example. Or you can publish the data to your intranet site, to PowerPoint, or
to a range of graphics files for other types of presentations.
The program's utility is extraordinary. Your help desk
professionals can trace through each hub and router on the network to see why
someone in accounting can't log on to the Internet and then identify all other
users affected in the same way. You can easily identify all users still running
Microsoft Windows 95 and determine which machines do not have enough RAM to
upgrade to Windows 2000.
Program operation is a touch less intuitive than with
many drawing programs, though, and as with all inventory-related programs, data
entry requirements can become pretty substantial. The result, however, is the
ability to perform your work more effectively and to have a visual schematic as
well.
| Price as tested |
£1399 |
| Price is list/street/direct? |
List |
| System requirements |
128MB RAM; 3-D graphics card; Windows 95, 98,
2000, or NT 4.0 |
| Exports data to |
various database formats |
| Inventory tools |
Yes |
| Associates specific applications and desktop
settings with user |
Yes |
| Database import utilities |
Yes |
| Monitoring capabilities |
Yes |
| Reports configuration information |
Yes |
| System administration tool |
Yes |
User Ratings 3 users have rated this product
| Average rating: |
10 |
| General Rating: |
10 |
| Tech. Support: |
10 |
|
netViz Case
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