Network Associates to watch Bay gear

Santa Clara, Calif.

In the coming weeks, Network Associates will extend its monitoring and trouble-shooting software to analyze a broader variety of devices.

The company this week will add support for Bay Networks routers to RouterPM, a tool that predicts router failures. Previously, the tool watched only Cisco routers for signs of trouble.

Separately, the company plans to use next month's NetWorld+Interop 98 conference in Atlanta to show off enhancements to its Total Network Visibility (TNV) analysis software suite. Network Associates will add Remote Monitoring (RMON) capabilities, simultaneous LAN and WAN troubleshooting and monitoring, and a reporting tool called Network Informant for showing trends. Further details about these enhancements were not available.

Network Associates' Sniffer products, included with TNV, help network managers find problems. But the company could have trouble expanding into areas such as performance management, says Mark Bouchard, senior research analyst at META Group, a Stamford, Conn., consulting firm.

"The whole concept of expanding the product makes perfect sense," he says. "It's just that Network Associates isn't known for [performance management], and they've got to sell uphill."

Don't forget about Bay

Adding Bay support to RouterPM was no easy task either, according to Paul Farr, director of marketing for Sniffer products at Network Associates. "Each one of the routers - even different models within a single manufacturer's line - has different sources of information," he says.

One difference might be where the route processing takes place. Some routers use one central processor, while others distribute the processing among their interface cards. Plus, how the routers manage their memory might affect at what point the memory becomes a bottleneck.

Network Associates also composed rules for watching Bay Networks gear that are analogous to those used with Cisco equipment. According to Farr, the rules are intended to look for congestion, unusual utilization levels and errors on LAN/WAN boundaries. They also examine how a router's CPU, memory and operating system are behaving.

Another enhancement to RouterPM, now on Version 3.2, is its integration with network management platforms, such as Hewlett-Packard OpenView. Whenever RouterPM predicts a problem, the software can now notify the platforms by generating an SNMP trap, Farr says.

This capability will be important because OpenView isn't tuned into every aspect of the network, says Tom Frohna, senior analyst at Ameritech, which uses RouterPM to keep an eye on the company's 750 Cisco routers. RouterPM can discover problems caused by misconfigurations in Source Route Bridging and send an alarm to the management platform, he points out.

In the future, Frohna says he'd like to see the product extended to ATM networks. Network Associates says that capability is on the drawing board.

RouterPM 3.2, which runs on Windows 95 and NT, will ship this week. The software starts at $11 per node for 10,000-node networks.

Network Associates: (408) 988-3832