Entuity improves Eye of the Storm's network vision

InfoWorld - Entuity on Tuesday unfurled Version 4.5 of its Eye of the Storm network management suite, equipping administrators with greater visibility and control over the network.

Designed to perform continual automated network device and topology discovery and management, Eye of the Storm now offers hierarchical administrative support, as well as support for firewalls, VPN gateways, and servers and hosts.

The hierarchical administrative support enables network operators to define users and groups and the level of network visibility they have.

"Our customers really had a need to create multiple levels of users and of groups, and to assign specific visibility and application control to each of those users and groups," said Ken Klapproth, director of marketing at Entuity.

In a distributed environment, for example, local administrators could be given control over just the network resources they manage, while a central admin could have an overarching view of and control over the entire network. Limiting the level of visibility and control that users have over network assets enhances network security and compliance, Klapproth noted.

Eye of the Storm 4.5 also extends administrative capabilities to include visibility and control over active client sessions, and it offers a messaging utility to inform users of important information and events.

Additionally, Eye of the Storm boasts a new module for supporting firewalls. After automatically discovering the firewall device and populating devices details in the product's CMDB (configuration management database), the module monitors and records the device's resource utilization. This information "gives the network operations folks the ability to do capacity planning and proactive maintenance," said Klapproth.

With this release, only Nokia firewall devices are supported, but the list will grow based on customer demand, Klapproth added.

Similarly, Version 4.5 delivers VPN gateway support, monitoring and recording VPN tunnel behavior in Eye of the Storm CMDB. Support for VPNs from Shiva is available now; additional support will be added based on customer demand.

Finally, Version 4.5 extends the solution's reach to include monitoring of servers and hosts. Captured in the CMDB, server details enable admins to isolate software with known vulnerabilities, produce patch lists, identify servers in need of patching, monitor trends in disk usage, and more.

Available immediately, Eye of the Storm 4.5 starts at $50,000 and runs on Windows 2003, Solaris, and Red Hat Linux environments.

Companies using Eye of the Storm include Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank, SAP, and Verizon.