Wireless admins looking for a comprehensive and robust diagnostic tool will be attracted to AirMagnet Distributed's fully equipped and capable monitoring system.
AirMagnet Distributed 4.0. AirMagnet, (408) 400-0200. www.airmagnet.com
Although similar in design to AirMagnet Distributed--complete with sensors, console and management server--the likeness between Distributed and Guard is only skin-deep. AirDefense has focused its distributed WLAN security appliance on providing wireless IDS while presenting a detailed view of the interaction of WLAN devices. It has succeeded. Guard, also in beta, led the pack in IDS functionality and was second only to AirMagnet Distributed in troubleshooting detail.
At first glance, Guard seems expensive, but in our two pricing scenarios, AirDefense stayed in the ballpark. The turnkey appliance comprises a rack-mounted dual-processor management server running a hardened version of Red Hat Linux with a relational database, application software for rogue analysis, IDS, operational support, enterprise policy management and comprehensive reporting.
Guard was one of the easiest systems to install and configure. A few minutes after we input basic settings through an intuitive text-based menu, it was operational.
An SSL-encrypted welcome page with a dashboard listing alarm and device counts, and a list of alarms by device, showed us the status of our WLAN at a glance. Unlike AirMagnet, AirDefense doesn't provide a page that groups APs or SSIDs with their associated clients; we missed this feature, which made it easy for us to visualize wireless relationships. AirDefense's dashboard also doesn't provide a treelike view of alarms; rather, alarms are summarized by device and type. Hovering over the alarm gave us some detail, but we had to drill into each alarm for more information. On the other hand, the alarms section let us easily sort and group various alarms by type, device and time, as well as acknowledge and clear alarms.
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