Top 13 Reasons To Use NetCrunch Network Monitoring

AdRem Software
6 min readJan 5, 2017

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The NetCrunch 9.3 Main Atlas Dashboard

There are countless network monitoring and management solutions out there. Free and commercial, open source and not. The solution you choose will have a huge impact on your network visibility and uptime. Why should you give NetCrunch a try?

A Modern IT Stack

1. Automated Discovery

Modern networks can be complicated beasts, with many different vendors providing many different devices and applications that need your attention. AdRem Software are Cisco, VMWare and Microsoft partners with support for hundreds of popular devices and applications out of the box.

Custom Mapping in NetCrunch 9.3

2. Dynamic Views and Maps

The views in NetCrunch are dynamic and updated in real-time. Many are created for you automatically as well, and we offer powerful customization with live widgets. Wherever you are, get a live look at the health of your network, without delay and without refreshing.

Included NetCrunch Integrations

3. Two-way Integration Capabilities

NetCrunch 9.3 has simple, out-of-the-box integration with 21 popular messaging services and service/help desks. When an alert happens on your network, you can not only get an SMS or an e-mail, but we can send a tweet, or create a ticket in PagerDuty. Job’s done? Close the ticket and we’ll close the alert automatically.

Green lights mean network uptime

4. Automated Corrective Actions

The purpose of monitoring your network is to maintain uptime. Downtime is expensive. So is your time, however. Why not automate obvious tasks and free yourself to focus on what really matters? With NetCrunch you can run scripts, restart services and reboot machines automatically. Disk space below 10%? Run a script and delete temp files. If that doesn’t solve it, then we can notify you.

The University of Hawaii’s underwater Aloha Cabled Observatory

5. Limitless Monitoring Capabilities

You don’t need multiple products to monitor and manage multiple devices. NetCrunch has comprehensive support for SNMP up to and including SNMPv3. We have thousands of pre-compiled MIBs, and also a MIB compiler if you have lesser-known or custom made devices. OpenManager and External Events let you feed data into NetCrunch, and react to it however you’d like. Via API, syslogs, traps, you can monitor anything that can send us info.

Automatic Alert Correlation in NetCrunch

6. Automatic Alert Correlation

What good is a list of events if you don’t know which have been remedied and which ones are still ongoing? With automatic alert correlation in NetCrunch you can view only those events that are currently ongoing and need your attention. Is an alert too sensitive and appearing too often? Event analysis lets you adjust thresholds to fit your needs.

NetCrunch with GrafCrunch in a Network Operations Center

7. Custom Dashboards and NOC Room Optimization

NetCrunch is optimized for multi-screen NOC room settings. You can run multiple dynamic views and dashboards, and even integrate other data sources with GrafCrunch, our fork of the popular open-source dashboarding utility Grafana.

Traffic flow monitoring in NetCrunch

8. Traffic Flow Monitoring

NetCrunch supports traffic flow monitoring and analytics for NetFlow/IPFix as well as sFlow and all related protocols (like jFlow for Juniper switches). We’re also the only mainstream monitoring solution that is certified Cisco Compatible, and you can use Cisco NBAR to get deep application analytics as well. Do your devices not support NBAR? We have our own library of definitions as well, and you can make custom ones.

Layer-2 Physical Segments Maps in NetCrunch

9. Layer-2 Physical Segments Maps with Live and Historic Traffic

NetCrunch is Layer 2/3 aware, and offers a physical segments map to show you all the physical connections between your devices. On top of that, we can show live and historic up/down traffic on individual interfaces, letting you drill and find bandwidth hogs.

Monitoring Dependencies in NetCrunch

10. Monitoring Dependencies to Prevent Alert Floods

48-Port switch goes down? You don’t need 48 e-mails or SMS’s that all the devices below it went down as well. Monitoring Dependencies in NetCrunch silence alerts and prevent alert floods. This way you only get that one critical alert that your critical device went down. Of course, you can edit them however you’d like, and make dependencies at your leisure

NetCrunch offers class-crushing scalability

11. Unmatched Scalability

A single server of NetCrunch can support over 1,000,000 monitored elements on a virtual machine. That’s scalability the competition can’t touch. Similar products are limited to 2,500 “sensors” or 12,000 “elements”. No such limits here. Because of our scalability we can offer sensible node-based licensing. One device, is one node. You don’t have to pick and choose what things you want to monitor and which ones you have to ignore for performance or fiscal reasons.

Modern networks are constantly changing

12. Continuous Development

AdRem Software has been in business since 1998 making software for Novell and winning the Novell Developer’s Contest. In 2003 we launched NetCrunch and have been updating it ever since. We are constantly adding features to make sure you’re on the bleeding edge of capabilities.

Are you Big Data ready?

13. Embedded Database

Our dual SQL and NoSQL databases are offered free of charge and without any limitations on size or length of time you keep your data. All live data is kept in memory to ensure blazing fast response times. No separate SQL licensing or hardware requirements. You can even export data from NetCrunch to another service.

Why Choose Anything Else?

This is just a small taste of what a powerful network monitoring solution can do. NetCrunch is designed for the modern IT stack. It offers powerful features to systems administrators and network professionals to ensure visibility into their networks and maintain network uptime.

Download NetCrunch today and get not only 30 days of free tech support, but free installation assistance as well. You can schedule a live webinar with an engineer who can help you get a proof-of-concept set up. If you like it, keep it. If not, no harm done.

NetCrunch wins the 2016 Return on Investment Award

NetCrunch is also a price leader in the industry, and the recipient of Network Computing’s 2016 Return on Investment Award. Our simple node-based licensing lets you monitor your applications and devices without worrying about “sensor” or “element” limits. We even offer price-matching and a competitive cross-grade. If you’re already using something, we’ll give you a permanent license of our software at the cost of your current solution’s renewal. Why choose anything else?

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AdRem Software
AdRem Software

Written by AdRem Software

AdRem Software makes award-winning commercial and freeware network monitoring & management software trusted by thousands of admins worldwide www.adremsoft.com