NetCrunch

NetCrunch, developed by AdRem Software, is a highly aggressive, deeply capable competitor to PRTG and SolarWinds in the Windows-based mid-market sector. Its absolute defining characteristic is its obsession with "Policy-Based Management" and massive automation, trying to reduce the amount of time an IT admin spends manually configuring alerts. Instead of an admin manually setting a CPU alert on 100 different Windows servers, NetCrunch utilizes "Monitoring Packs." When it auto-discovers a server and realizes it is a Microsoft Exchange email server, it automatically applies the "Exchange Monitoring Pack," instantly turning on 50 specific alerts for email queues, database health, and memory usage without the admin lifting a finger. It is heavily favored for its incredible, highly responsive thick-client interface (though it has a web interface as well). The desktop console allows an engineer to zoom in and out of massive, automatically generated Layer 2 topology maps rendered in real-time, displaying live bandwidth utilization numbers literally hovering over the green lines connecting the switches on the screen.