Lens

Granted, the job responsibilities of a network administrator working in a medium-size company are very different from those of an admin employed by a large organization with international coverage. Then again, irrespective of what sort of network you are administering, the duties you always need to account for is knowing the network status.

Lens is a piece of software designed to help you create a diagram of the LAN you are monitoring, so you can effortlessly find out the status of the network along with all the other devices connected.

While the program comes with a standard and a web-based interface, you should keep in mind that you can perform most actions within the latter one. To be more precise, the standard UI's role is to enable you to verify that the address and port of the administrator computer is correct.

You can draw the diagram of the network in the web-based window by adding the devices that are connected to your network. In this sense, you can add laptops, monitors, computers, printers, cloud services, antenna satellites, so on and so forth. You can include your own icons, a feature that can come in handy if you are using special network devices on the LAN.

Even though the program allows you to set the properties for the applications you want to connect, the method you can do this correctly is counter-intuitive. It would have been useful if the app came with a Help guide or tutorial that explained the steps of properly setting up your network.

At the same time, it would have been nice if the program enabled you to import your network diagram, an option that would be a time saver if you are administering a large LAN. Moreover, it would be useful if the background featured a grid, link nodes and a function to automatically align the network devices.

While it is true that the app could use a bit more work, it would still be an efficient tool for keeping an eye on a relatively small network that features only several devices.