During setup, LANsurveyor took us for a stroll through the discovery process. You'll need to know your SNMP community strings and the network to which they apply, but in return you'll get quick discovery of local subnets. Discovery options include using Active Directory as well as the usual subnet ranges. LANsurveyor gave us some status feedback during discovery, showing the number of nodes, routers and switches found, for example. This information is helpful when discovery is taking longer than expected, and it's a useful diagnostic tool if you're getting oddball results.
LANsurveyor made a valiant attempt to map our Layer 2 port numbers for devices attached to SNMP-managed devices. It worked satisfactorily, but because SNMP MIBs aren't perfect, LANsurveyor, like any management product attempting Layer 2 mapping, isn't perfect either. Still, this is a worthwhile feature that can help document the network and diagnose problems. Just expect to spend time auditing results. LANsurveyor does provide a report listing the MAC addresses seen on managed devices; this was helpful for unraveling some mismapped devices we encountered.
Part of the LANsurveyor's discovery process looks for "Neon Responders," proprietary performance agents for Windows and Mac boxes. When none was found, the process asked us to install them. So we did. The responders gather system-management information, such as the memory, CPUs and applications on our desktops and servers. Managing these systems is limited to getting inventory information passively, though you could remotely shut down, reboot, change passwords, launch applications and take control of those systems using Timbuktu or VNC (neither is included with the product).
The process to install the responders selected, by default, every device discovered. We said sure and let it run. Our bad--we wanted to remove the agents after testing, and removal isn't automated. Neon says automation to uninstall agents will be in the next release.
LANsurveyor let us create various polling configurations, thus mitigating polling traffic, which eats bandwidth, and more important, spending our management server cycles wisely. Each configuration can have unique targets culled from the discovered inventory, and different alerts specified for failed and recovered devices. Each poll configuration displayed a list that showed our minimum/maximum/average response times. This let us poll critical devices more aggressively.
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