Entuity adds firewall, system support to Eye

Entuity this week announced it had upgraded its network management software to include capabilities to monitor in real-time firewall metrics, VPN gateways, as well as host and server systems.

Eye of the Storm offers automated network device and topology discovery and management and the new release, Version 4.5 offers customers with the option to purchase a firewall support module that would let the software monitor Nokia firewalls, to start. Entuity says it will continue to upgrade Eye - which monitors performance and availability of routers, switches hubs, server blades, voice traffic and more - with more device and system support in line with customer demand.

Entuity also added support for Cisco's Service Assurance Agent (SAA), which enables networks managers with Cisco gear to monitor the DNS, DHCP server, as well as monitor network jitter and packet loss, and Web server response time. Also new with this release is the ability to monitor Shiva VPN Gateways, also with a module that is added on to the core product, and expanded system support in the Eye 4.5 Server Monitoring Module, which captures details such as CPU usage, total memory, available memory, number of processes and more. The information collected by the server monitoring software can also populate Entuity's configuration management database, which the company says could make it easier for customers to isolate known vulnerabilities, produce patch lists and monitor trends in usage among servers.

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Entuity this week announced it had upgraded its network management software to include capabilities to monitor in real-time firewall metrics, VPN gateways, as well as host and server systems.

Eye of the Storm offers automated network device and topology discovery and management and the new release, Version 4.5 offers customers with the option to purchase a firewall support module that would let the software monitor Nokia firewalls, to start. Entuity says it will continue to upgrade Eye - which monitors performance and availability of routers, switches hubs, server blades, voice traffic and more - with more device and system support in line with customer demand.

Entuity also added support for Cisco's Service Assurance Agent (SAA), which enables networks managers with Cisco gear to monitor the DNS, DHCP server, as well as monitor network jitter and packet loss, and Web server response time. Also new with this release is the ability to monitor Shiva VPN Gateways, also with a module that is added on to the core product, and expanded system support in the Eye 4.5 Server Monitoring Module, which captures details such as CPU usage, total memory, available memory, number of processes and more. The information collected by the server monitoring software can also populate Entuity's configuration management database, which the company says could make it easier for customers to isolate known vulnerabilities, produce patch lists and monitor trends in usage among servers.

For Peter Bartz, network operations manager at of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Entuity's added support for Cisco's SAA will help him better test the functionality on his DNS and DHCP servers. Bartz explains he has to distribute DNS traffic across the campus with DNS servers in 19 locations.

"We need to be able to monitor the health of those servers, and the SAA and host support in 4.5 we're beta testing should helps us do that," Bartz says. An Entuity customer for about two years, Bartz says he installed the software on a Solaris system and it discovered the infrastructure, without Bartz having to distribute software agents. He estimates his current installation of Eye collects data on 110,000 objects within the university's network.

"Being a pseudo ISP, we're working on building a Web portal on our own and incorporate data collected by Entuity to show network information related to the services we provide to our 19 colleges and hundreds of departments," Bartz says.

Entuity software uses data models that can be extended to fit specific customer requirements when needed to address critical new device types. Reports can range from inventory and asset reports, to capacity and resource utilization reports, to performance and availability reports. The software competes with similar offerings from Concord Communications (now part of CA), Micromuse (acquired by IBM) and InfoVista.

Eye 4.5 runs on Windows 2003, Sun Solaris and Red Hat Linux. The management console resides on a centralized server and uses a combination of distributed agents, automated discovery, event traps and polling algorithms to extract data from network, system and application sources. Through automated trending, Eye can "learn" behavior patterns across the network and establish what's normal and what deviates from normal - and generate alerts. The software integrates with other management systems such as HP's OpenView or CA's Unicenter, and its management console can be launched from within these other event management systems.