The Dude

When I hear someone say “the dude”, I immediately think about the 1998 cult favorite, The Big Lebowski. If you were hoping that this software has something to do with the movie, I must inform you that this isn’t the case. The Dude is a Mikrotik product that is offered for the great price of free; it is a network monitoring utility that will help you manage your network environment, map your network devices, and notify you when something goes wrong.

You will have to complete a simple installation procedure to get The Dude up and running on your Widnows PC (as you can see in the Quick Look video that accompanies this article). The Dude’s setup wizard will ask you to choose what components to install: reset any previous configuration; The Dude program and DLLs; The Dude server files; Start Menu shortcuts.

A Device Discovery prompt will show up when you launch The Dude for the first time. You see, The Dude can scan all devices within specified subnets; once it’s done with the scan, it can draw a map of your networks. On top of that, The Dude can monitor services for your devices and it can automatically perform actions when a device’s state changes. And on top of that, The Dude can mass upgrade RouterOS devices, configure such devices, run networking tools, and more.

Seeing that The Dude is free software, you have all the time in the world to uncover everything that it can do. If you need help using The Dude, check out the application’s online manual.

The Dude is free, it has a user friendly interface, and it works as advertised. It’s a really useful networking monitoring tool.