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If you've considered network management suites out of your league, it's time to re-evaluate. While you won't get champagne features on a beer budget, some lower-priced network management products do provide distributed computing functions, like Web publishing interfaces and distributed polling, as well as simple event and alarm and performance management.

We set a budget of $10,000 to manage 1,000 nodes and sent out a call to the usual suspects. Castle Rock Computing, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Ipswitch and SolarWinds.Net send us products to test. We gathered the software in our Syracuse University Real-World Labs® and put them through their paces with the FCAPS model in mind.

We expected to find a product that would shine in the fault and performance areas, and SolarWinds.Net's Orion Network Performance Monitor confirmed our hunch. It offered depth, flexibility and functionality right out of the box--without making us jump through hoops--earning it our Editor's Choice award. But the other entries were not far behind; overall, we were impressed with what we could get--in some cases for less per day than a double latte.