A leader in network management software, SolarWinds, announced that ipMonitor, the company's out-of-the-box turnkey network monitoring solution for the small- and medium-sized business (SMB), has received the Network World 2008 "Best of the Tests" award in the Network Management and Monitoring category.

    Based on its superior performance, ease-of-use, and feature functionality, ipMonitor was awarded the "Best of the Tests" distinction and received 4.7 out of 5 stars. Highlighted features include:

   * ipMonitor's ability to quickly and accurately discover applications, servers, devices and services on the network.
    * The solution's ease-of-use feature that can group results by IP address or domain name and suggest what to monitor more closely.
    * Integrated security that utilizes SSL certificates, credentials, password-challenge authentication methods, as well as IP address filters and delegated administrative accounts.

    Kenny Van Zant, chief product strategist, SolarWinds, said: "We are thrilled to have ipMonitor recognized by Network World and believe this recognition validates ipMonitor's strengths-ease-of-use, security and affordability". "We credit much of our continued success to our large and growing technical user community on Thwack for inspiring and influencing our product development."

    SolarWinds introduced ipMonitor v9.0 rarlier this month, designed for SMB's with less than 500 managed devices. The new version includes industry-leading SmartMonitor technology, a cutting-edge web interface and graphic-based dashboard, network mapping capabilities, out-of-the-box user experience monitoring, and instant monitoring of business-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory and SQL server.

    The 2008 "Best of the Tests" Awards were bestowed by Network World upon a select few products in enterprise networking categories that registered the top performance spots in its hands-on testing program during 2007 - the best of the best. In all, Network World tested and reported on hundreds of enterprise products in that time frame, selecting 12 winners.