NetScout Moves to Unify Network, Performance Management Tools

Computerworld - NetScout Systems Inc. last week announced two product upgrades designed to unify real-time and historical reporting of network and application performance data on large corporate networks.
At the heart of the upgrades are NetScout's new Common Data Model (CDM) Adaptors, software designed to help users gather basic performance data from a range of switches and routers, said Leslie Miller, product marketing manager at the Westford, Mass.-based company.
The new technology will be offered within NetScout's nGenius Performance Manager 2.0 software and nGenius Probe 6.0 firmware, which is a rack-mounted device that gathers and analyzes traffic-flow records from network nodes. Both upgrades will be available by the end of this month, NetScout said.
Keith Axtell, a performance analyst at Consumers Energy in Jackson, Mich., has been testing Performance Manager 2.0 for the past month, having installed an earlier version a year ago.
One improvement that Axtell has noticed is an enhanced ability to simultaneously run multiple windows containing network performance data on his PC. "You did a lot of window management in the earlier release," he said.
Consumers Energy, an electric and natural gas utility, has to monitor 6,500 nodes in a network that spans 100 sites in Michigan. NetScout's technology has given IT staffers better tools for monitoring connectivity to all those devices, Axtell said, adding that the improvements have become especially critical as the utility company moves from managing mainframe systems to managing distributed systems.
Performance Manager 2.0 has been in production use for the past month in a small segment of the network at the Uncasville, Conn.-based Mohegan Sun casino, which supports a total of 7,500 nodes, 8,000 phone lines and 6,200 slot machines that are serially connected to the network.
The new version will be especially useful because the CDM Adaptors can bring in information from other data sources besides Remote Monitoring, said Kevin Carey, the casino's network administrator.
Michael Howard, an analyst at Infonetics Research Inc. in San Jose, said that NetScout is the first vendor to come out with unified technology for network and application monitoring.
Howard predicted that the offering will quickly be emulated by rivals such as Concord Communications Inc. and Network Associates Inc.'s Sniffer Technologies unit.