Ganymede to keep an eye on apps

Research Triangle Park, N.C.

Network managers who want to track down problems in their networks and applications may take some comfort this week from Ganymede Software's plans to update its management software.

Ganymede's past tools have managed network performance, but by next year, the company promises to have a more complete system for monitoring applications. Ganymede representatives say the company's products will help managers plan for applications, as well as test, monitor and find problems in them.

"I really think they're heading in the right direction here," says Dennis Butcher, network consultant at Los Angeles oil company Atlantic Richfield Co.

Butcher says Ganymede's network performance management products currently help him check overall performance, but he has to use other tools to find the exact point of any bottleneck. The upcoming improvements should help him identify whether a bottleneck is occurring in a server, a client or the network, he says.

At the end of this month, Ganymede will ship its Application Scanner, software that helps create scripts to emulate applications and test their performance over a network. The company is also posting a library of premade scripts on its Web site. Application Scanner will run on Windows 95, 98 and NT. The new software will cost $4,500.

This summer, Ganymede plans to unveil software to measure end-to-end application performance. The Pegasus Application Monitor will be a companion to Pegasus network monitoring software, which has been shipping since July 1998.

Pegasus Application Monitor will measure the response time and availability of applications, generate alerts when problems occur, and track service-level agreements. Pricing is not available.

Ganymede says the combination of the application monitoring software and current network performance monitoring products will give network managers a complete view of the performance end users are experiencing.

While the application monitor will help network managers find problems and spot trends in application performance, other Ganymede products that assist in planning and deploying applications won't be available until 2000.

Ganymede: (919) 469-0997