Network analysis vendor Netcordia in January will release a slew of new features to pump up its suite of NetMRI appliances.

Company executives say the improvements to the NetMRI family of appliances will help customers manage network configurations, ensure compliance, optimize performance, ensure security and reduce complexity.

NetMRI installs on a switch port or router interface and identifies network devices and the ports, or interfaces, being used to route traffic across the net. Network managers input the blocks of IP addresses for the appliance to monitor, and the appliance begins collecting data such as CPU utilization, routing table information, VLAN activities, MAC addresses and port connections. The appliances are packaged with software, which in the latest release included templates to help network managers better identify potentially out-of-compliant devices.

NetMRI - which performs an automated series of health checks of network devices such as routers, switches and firewalls - will offer improved QoS verifications, routing neighbors detection and firewall configuration checks.

"There are situations in which QoS policies don't perform as expected or routing configurations are off and firewalls are hard to manage," says Terry Slattery, Netcordia CTO and founder. He says the company added video network monitoring capabilities to its QoS analysis, which verifies QoS configuration and monitors queue drops.

"There can be bandwidth reasons queues drop or it can be prioritizations that need to be changed," he explains.

NetMRI will also be able to ensure that routers and their neighbors are configured correctly. Slattery says routing neighbor analysis will help network managers ensure the configurations on each router are accurate. "It's one of the best practices we perform to make sure that a configuration error among router neighbors is caught before it causes problems," Slattery says.

Lastly, the firewall support will enable network managers to use one tool to check the configurations of specific firewalls from Check Point, Cisco, and Juniper's NetScreen. Slattery says the company will add more vendor gear per customer request in future releases.

"We started with some of the more popular firewalls from specific vendors," he says.

The company is expected to make the upgrades generally available in January. NetMRI comes in various models, starting with the NetMRI campus model for up to 200 routers and switches for about $25,000.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.