Cheops 0.61 review

Cheops is an Open Source Network User Interface

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 311K Developer: Mark Spencer

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Cheops is an Open Source Network User Interface. It is designed to be the network equivalent of a swiss-army knife, unifying your network utilities. Cheops is for the network what a file manager is for your filesystem.

Here are some key features of "Cheops":
Organize your network into convenient pages so you can place relevant portions together, and quickly go to a specific area or specific network.
Cheops can optionally determine the OS of hosts on the network, selecting appropriate icons for them.
Cheops can show you the routes taken to access areas of your network. (This feature is designed for larger networks, with routers, subnets, etc. If you only have a simple LAN where all your hosts are connected with hubs, then it'll just draw a bunch of lines between you and the other computers) This mapping not only makes heirarchy clearer, but can show unusual routing issues, like this unusual router triangle. Unfortunately, you have to place the machines yourself, but cheops handles the interconnections.
Right clicking on a host quickly shows you a list of common services it supports, and rapid, easy access to them.
For large networks, you can view the network with smaller icons, or even as a simple list of networks. Layout is arrangeable by domain, hostname, IP address, etc and searching is supported in both iconic and list formats.
Cheops includes a generalized TCP port scanner to see what ports on your network are in use.
Retrieve version information for certain services, to be sure any given host is up-to-date with the latest revision of its services.
Cheops is highly configurable both through text-based configuration files and through a graphical "Options" dialog box.
Cheops includes a simple integrated SNMP browser, including write capability, using the UCD SNMP library. Cheops also supports a plugin interface, which includes support for SNMP plugins, similar in concept to those of HP Openview.
Cheops can monitor your critical servers, and immediately notify you through its event log, standard e-mail, and soon via paging, when things go wrong. Know exactly what's up or down, and just when problems occur.