Two companies recently unveiled products designed to help IT staff define the cost of IT and track usage across enterprise networks.

Evident Software (formerly Apogee Networks) and NetQoS separately announced tools to show IT managers how users consume network, server and application resources. The products put a dollar amount on the cost of the services to internal business units or groups.

Evident last week introduced Evident Enterprise 5, which now includes visualization tools intended to provide a portal for business, finance and IT executives to view IT utilization. This Analyzer application provides users with about 25 templates to generate reports. A second new application, called Analyzer Pro, provides in-depth analysis based on the data in the reports (IT managers can drill down on geographic locations, for example) to plan for future IT capacity and operations expenses based on usage. The company also added a relational database-driven historical trending tool as well as Linux platform support in this release.

"Customers can bring the product in and use it in an assessment capacity to get recommendations on how they could improve their data center - for example, which servers could be consolidated," says Helen Donnelly, vice president of marketing and product management. Ballpark pricing for an average deployment of the software is up to $350,000.

The software resides on Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris servers and collects application flows, or conversation data, from a variety of network probes, devices, servers and end users. Evident uses a distributed model and recommends users install its software on servers across networks and in data centers. A centralized server collects the data from distributed servers and acts as an administration console for IT managers.

The software also uses customers' NetFlow-enabled devices and remote monitoring probes. Customers can install probes themselves. Evident’s software collects data from proxy, Exchange, Lotus and other server gateways that export unique data feeds. The software uses the cost metrics IT staff have assigned to specific network services and resources. It compares usage and calculates the cost based on those measurements.
 
Separately, NetQoS this week plans to add an appliance to its product suite. NetQoS Allocate monitors Cisco routers using NetFlow to determine usage and build chargeback reports.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.