ENT Network Monitor is an NT Service Application that you can install on each of the networks that you manage to regularly collect information about the hardware and software on those networks. This information is then posted back to your Enterprise Server which will store the information in your Enterprise Inventory.

Once this information has been stored in your ENT Inventory it can be used to detect faults and changes, generate reports or simply used as a reference for the assets that you own or manage. Technicans and helpdesk staff can refer to this and record additional information, such as the details of any tasks or support requests (helpcalls) associated with the IT asset.

Since ENT Network Monitor is typically installed on the local network where the machines that you want to audit are located, you don't have to open any ports on firewalls or routers that protect the networks that you manage in order to be able to audit the machines on those networks.

Typically, using ENT NetCenter to collect information about machines over the network, around 1MB of data would have to be transfered between ENT NetCenter and each machine that it audits. An audit on a local network typically takes around 4-5 seconds (so around 250 kbps). On a local network this would probably represent much less than 0.04% of the total available bandwidth, so hardly poses any problem. However on slower WAN connections 1MB can be quite a lot of data!

Using ENT Network Monitor however, all auditing is performed over the local networks where your managed machines reside, using the ENT Network Monitor service. Once ENT Network Monitor has collected the information about a machine, this information is assembled into an audit snapshot file which is then compressed down to around 3 kilobytes! This 3 kb of information is then what ENT Network Monitor will transfer accross the WAN connection back to your ENT Server, which can save you a LOT of bandwidth that you'd rather use for something else.

Additionally, you can configure each ENT Network Monitor so that audits are restricted to particular days of the week or to be run inside or outside particular hours, to ensure that ENT Network Monitor runs as efficiently and effectively as possible.