down your choices to a smaller group of network monitoring products. That way, you can quickly exclude or include different network monitoring products to your 'prospective' list. From that list of prospective network monitoring services, you can get further into the detail of the features and functions of each product.

The most important feature of any network monitoring product or service is the extent of the network that is monitored and how that information is viewable by the network management team. The best network monitoring software monitors all of the traffic going in and out of the local network, as well as all the traffic running inside the network. Some of the most common monitoring features and protocols are:

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)- monitors a web server's ability to accept incoming sessions and transmit a requested resource (or CGI script). This ensures that the web server not only adheres to the HTTP protocol but also transmits the exact content of the requested resource.

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)- retrieves and acts on data from SNMP network devices, services and applications.

POP3 (Post Office Protocol)- monitors an SMTP mail server's ability to accept mail and distribute it to a POP3 mail server.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)- monitors an SMTP mail server's ability to accept mail and distribute it to an IMAP4 mail server.

DNS (Domain Name Servers)- monitors the Primary and Secondary DNS server's ability to respond to name lookups. A prefabricated DNS request is alternately sent to both DNS servers until either a DNS server responds or the maximum test length expires.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)- monitors the ability of a FTP server to log in a user and transmit a requested file.

ADO (ActiveX Data Objects)- monitors the ability to log into to an external database or application server, and then issue a SQL Statement to perform a query and retrieve results for analysis.

Link Checker- monitors the ability to retrieve a web page from a web server and then sequentially validate links on the web page.

The specific network monitoring features and technologies can differ widely, but the best network monitoring software captures the information then makes the real-time and historical information available through a variety of standard and customizable formats, such as graphs, charts, web-based remote access, PDF files, CSV files, and so on.