The Silver Award winner in the Active Directory category is a real-time diagnostic tool used for monitoring, detecting and troubleshooting conflicts in Active Directory. It does so by scrutinizing transactions between Active Directory and network systems and reporting any errors or failures discovered at the LDAP application layer.

It was an extremely tight race between the Silver and Bronze winners. In the end, Winternals Software's Insight for Active Directory narrowly edged out Quest Software's Recovery Manager for fractionally higher functionality and innovation by virtue of features that flag disruptions in real time and provide in-depth, actionable analysis to help administrators resolve issues quickly.

From a single workstation, administrators can troubleshoot Active Directory incidents anywhere on the network, including remote computers. Insight for Active Directory lets administrators view a list of Active Directory transactions in their totality or filter for specific events or groups of events. Moreover, administrators can also choose to label specific sessions, processes or related items with a shared color, making it easier to follow complex relationships.

Pricing: Pricing starts at $395 per user console, $249 per remote server and $20 per remote workstation monitored. Volume discounts apply as the node count increases.

Brent Sheets, senior editor