Hot technologies, such as VoIP, security and wireless, will get their share of attention at this week's Interop conference in New York City, but it is the often-overlooked area of network management that could steal the show.

Vendors will swarm the event to demonstrate new products that go beyond basic device- and link-monitoring and focus on application performance management in particular. The estimated 7,000 attendees will take in sessions such as "Are traditional network management tools irrelevant for converged networks?" and "Why is network management cool again?"

Vendors with network management expertise now more than ever are putting application-centric metrics and intelligence in their products, industry watchers say, because network managers now are also responsible for application performance.

"Network management has been evolving away from managing the network on a component or device level, to managing it as a delivery system for application services," says Dennis Drogseth, a vice president with Enterprise Management Associates. "The network team is being called upon to troubleshoot and prevent application performance problems, because the network touches applications and applications can be scattered across a distributed network in pieces."

Vendors add app intelligence

Network General is debuting its Network Intelligence Suite, which couples its Visualizer 4.2 products with NetVigil 4.2 software from Fidelia (acquired in February). The company also is announcing a series of Business Forensics packages, which use Visualizer and NetVigil software, along with analysis and intelligence on specific technologies, such as VoIP. Network Physics also is using Interop to air its latest offerings, which it says are better now at managing VoIP, SAP and other applications.

NetVigil 4.2 installs in a Linux environment with a SQL database on the back end; Visualizer 4.2 is a probe that installs at various points on the network. Network General says Fidelia's technology lets customers group elements and manage them across an infrastructure as a service, instead of having to tackle performance problems with distributed network protocol analysis tools.

Barney McCauley, principal IT specialist for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in California, says the combination of Network General probe technology and NetVigil software lets his team monitor traffic between two data centers and optimize his network to best support both locations. He tested a beta version of the suite and liked what he saw.