New Net Technologies Change Tracker

The Change Tracker from New Net Technologies is a full-scale combination of configuration management and policy compliance that can be deployed enterprise-wide to ensure workstations and servers, as well as network devices, firewalls and directories meet the organisation's configuration policy.

This product provides full-scale reporting and management of system health, availability, performance, users, compliance, configuration, changes to systems and asset management all in one place.

We found this offering to be a simple install. All the various components were all easily installed by running executables and following install wizards. After the installation was complete, all management was done through an easy-to-use management console.

Devices can be easily added to the system individually or the network can be scanned for devices to manage. The other components of Change Tracker include On-Line Manager, which is a web GUI for Change Manager allowing administration from any machine on the network; Compliance Hub, which is the policy and compliance piece of the suite; and Remote Angel, which deploys agents to the client machines. We found all of the components to be easy to use and manage.

The meat of the product comes from Change Tracker, which can be used to manage and track changes to configurations on routers and switches, and Compliance Hub, which is used to define and deploy prebuilt compliance policy or custom-built policy. Compliance Hub can manage running processes, services and registry entries easily and clone templates throughout the enterprise.

Documentation consisted of two PDF getting-started guides. The first detailed the installation and basic configuration of the Change Tracker and On-Line Manager, while the second focused on Compliance Hub and Remote Angel.

Both guides provided a solid amount of detail, step-by-step instructions and screen shots on how to get the product up and running. We did not receive nor could we find any other documentation. While we feel the guides provided were sufficient, we would have liked an administrator guide for more in-depth configuration information.

New Net Technologies offers limited no-cost support, but customers can purchase fuller support at a cost of 20 percent of the software list price. This includes phone-based technical support eight-hours-a-day/five-days-a-week, as well as email support. There is also a small support area on the website that includes a knowledge base and tutorial videos.

At a price of US$4,500 for up to 50 managed devices, we find this product to be a great value for the money. It provides a high amount of functionality with cross-platform and application flexibility.