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Avesta spices up net management

By Chris Nerney
Network World, 9/29/97

New York - It might seem as if there are more than enough network and system management products on the market, but Kam Saifi and his ex-Wall Street colleagues think there is room for at least one more.

Start-up Avesta Technologies, Inc., the company Saifi helped form in 1996 after leaving his job at Morgan Stanley's IT department, this week will launch an ambitious software package for managing enterprise networks comprising thousands or potentially millions of managed objects. The software will be shown at NetWorld+Interop 97 in Atlanta next week.

Avesta's core offering is called Trinity. It relies on a combination of Java and patent-pending reasoning technology to ferret out the root causes of IT service problems and determine the impact these problems will have on IT resources and business operations.

It is the quality of the information collected by Trinity that enables net managers to perform what Saifi calls "IT service management."

For example, Trinity's reasoning technology helps net administrators determine how a device fault or application performance problem will affect predefined service-level agreements related to network devices, PCs and servers, as well as applications. In addition, the software can identify what steps should first be taken to solve a problem, recommend moves that should be made to keep the problem from recurring and provide administrators with the documentation needed to solve a problem. The software also can provide business managers with information about application availability.

Too many existing products are simply "individual resource managers," said Saifi, who became frustrated with the lack of comprehensive IT management tools while on Wall Street. What is needed is a product that can manage complex corporate networks as well as emerging extranets, he said.

Avesta expects its software will complement products that manage individual network devices, systems or applications by correlating events collected by those packages. Trinity also will work alongside SNMP-based management products and broader offerings, such as Hewlett-Packard Co.'s HP OpenView and Computer Associates International, Inc.'s Unicenter TNG. Areas that Trinity does not focus on include software distribution, security and backup.

Trinity's makeup

At the heart of Trinity is a patent-pending model-based reasoning technology that uses Java-based agents to discover all of the elements that make up a network and the relationships among those elements. The information is used to create a model of the way faults and performance degradation permeate a network. The model can split into management domains and can be updated as data about the network changes.

Avesta will supply lightweight Java-based agents to build the model, as will third-party developers. In addition to building the model, the agents can be assigned to different tasks, such as monitoring error messages sent from applications to system logs and then generating events based on that information.

The model decides when information collected and processed by the agents should be dumped into a data store. Initially, Trinity will feature an Operational Data Store and a Microsoft Corp. SQL Server database that serves as a cache. Down the road, Avesta plans to offer a data store to house information that can be used to generate reports based on long-term trends.

Information collected by Trinity is presented to network and business managers via console software called Service Manager and Service Viewer (code-named Niagara). Service Manager is for net administrators who need to view and control IT service delivery.

Service Viewer has a Java-based client interface that can present a plethora of information, such as reports and alerts, via predefined channels that are pushed to the end user. For example, the manager of a trading desk could stay updated on whether traders are receiving news feeds, stock quotes and other information as scheduled. Not surprisingly, Avesta has blended into its software some of the ease-of-use and real-time information delivery features found in trader terminals used on Wall Street.

Trinity runs on Solaris and Windows NT servers, while Service Manager and Service Viewer run on Solaris, Windows NT and Windows 95 clients.

Trinity's Java underpinnings make it scalable and easy to use according to beta customer Andrew Feig, vice president of product engineering for ISP Voyager Networks, Inc. in New York.

"This product discovers my network, automatically pings based on threshholds (and) does some correlation filtering pretty much out of the box," he said. "I don't need a C++ programmer or a Java programmer to get basic reports out of the system quickly and accurately."

Voyager is using Trinity to monitor "anything that's SNMP-manageable," Feig said, including routers, switches, servers and modems. Trinity "sits on top" of other software managing-specific parts of the network, such as Cisco Systems, Inc.'s CiscoWorks.

Trinity currently is in beta. The client software will become generally available in the fourth quarter, followed by the release of the server software in the first quarter of 1998.

Avesta has not yet set pricing, but it will be on a per-server basis.

Avesta: (212) 285-1500.