The Dude network monitor offers the ability to customize countless configuration options, but unfortunately its UI is not particularly attractive or intuitive, and for some will even be downright confusing at times. Like many applications, The Dude uses a two-pane interface that lets you select a configuration item from a list on the left and view it on the right.
While this seems logical enough, the arrangement doesn't work very well in practice. For example, each time you select a configuration item it generates a new right-hand window that tiles vertically with those that are already open. This quickly leads to a very busy layout until you manually re-orient all of the windows so that they're all properly visible.
Making the task a bit easier is the fact that each configuration window has a series of buttons that will split it vertically or horizontally, allowing you to open additional windows in the free space created. Also on the plus side is the fact that The Dude's window layout is stored on the server rather than the client, so once you get everything set up the way you like it you can view it the same way from multiple clients.
The Dude offers ways to customize its behavior as well as appearance, including the ability to control how often network polling is preformed, how long to wait before timing out a device, and which services are polled on which devices. Interface issues rear their head here too, though. The configuration dialogs lack scroll bars, and as you select categories via an expandable hierarchy, the dialog box simply grows until it's the full height of your display, leaving certain configuration options unavailable off-screen unless you reclaim space by closing others.
If you'd prefer to administer The Dude via a browser, you can use its Web-based interface, but it doesn't duplicate all of the configuration options available in the Windows client. (The browser-based client does allow the use of SSL for secure remote connections.)
It's not unusual for free software to offer limited documentation, and The Dude is no exception. Documentation consists only of a fairly short online wiki (which can also be downloaded as a PDF file) that provides a very basic top-level look at the software and doesn't cover how to use many program features in any real depth. The Dude's docs are also somewhat out of date since they haven't been updated since version 1.0 of the software (we looked at v2.2 and beta releases of v3.0).
Although The Dude delivers many of the same capabilities that you'd find in pricey network monitoring tools, it could definitely use a better interface and more comprehensive and current documentation. Of course, it's really hard to argue with the price, and as long as ease-of-use isn't your main priority and you don't mind tinkering, The Dude is a decent network utility that should be worth the download.
Pros: Free, lots of customizable options, useful network mapping features
Cons: Rather unintuitive user interface, device alerts not turned on by default, minimal and out of date documentation
