Seventy-seven percent of respondents said they prefer integrated tool suites, defined as applications with a consistent interface and dataflow capabilities. Further 65% of respondents using integrated tool suites say they keep the application open "almost constantly," as compared to "almost never," "once a month," "once a week," or "once a day." Integrated tool suite users also said they believe there are significant time-saving measures associated with integrated tool suites. Only 56% of respondents prefer bundled tool suites over individual tools, 40% of which access the bundled tool suite "once a week." Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they prefer individual tools to solve network problems, accessing those tools only when necessary.

Ninety-two percent of respondents said they found PacketTrap's pt360 Network Management Tool Suite extremely useful.

"We keep PacketTrap's dashboard on all day. We keep it on a large-screen LCD monitor, wall-mounted in our office to monitor critical systems," said Terry Sherb, CIO of California Hospital Association.

The Top 3 Tools
Rated top tool category was server monitoring tools, which poll each server on the network for current status and session statistics on CPU, memory, deep resources, availability and response time of services, network traffic, and maintenance scheduling. Server monitoring was rated the most popular tool, with 52% of respondents stating they use it constantly. Application monitoring, a tool that monitors and provides current session statistics on network application connectivity, availability, usage, performance, speed, read-write activity, log activity, and other indicators, was rated second, with 40% stating they use it constantly. Netflow analyzer tools, a netflow tool that monitors Cisco IOS NetFlow and IPFIX information and provides real-time and session reporting on traffic activity and deep packet inspection, was rated third, with 39% saying they use it constantly.

"Network engineers have been abused for too long with disparate point tools and a lot of the solutions out there now are claiming they are complete toolkits but in reality, they are just a list of tools bundled together," said Steve Goodman, CEO of PacketTrap. "The takeaway from the survey is that IT departments want to solve their network problems with the least amount of hassle as possible, and we believe that our solution, the pt360, does just that."

About PacketTrap Networks:
PacketTrap is favored for its ability to cleanly integrate open source technology with its own library of network diagnostic tools within a centralized network dashboard. PacketTrap's flagship solution, pt360 provides you with a personal look into your network and lets you complete bandwidth utilization, network discovery and other tasks from a single screen. It includes port scan, SNMP scans, TFTP server tools, reporting capabilities and more. PacketTrap believes most current offerings are point products lacking a central dashboard, integration and correlation. They are complex, expensive and/or poorly supported. PacketTrap is committed to providing solutions that are clean to use and integrated together.