Concord's Network Health 4.5 - and how network reporting is turning a corner

By Dennis Drogseth
Network World on Network/Systems Management, 10/04/99

One of the more dramatic business developments in network management in recent years is the advent of advanced reporting packages that provide crisp, easy-to-read summaries of network information. Without a doubt, Concord Communications is the single most prominent brand exemplar of this trend. More than presenting qualitatively new information, Concord has made largely existing information more accessible, more integrated and more meaningful. By doing this Concord has helped to make network management more relevant to business planners - a most useful development given the accelerated pace with which IT and service providers must now address business requirements.

With its success, Concord has brought on a lot of challengers, and now the bar is set higher than ever for advanced network reporting. Reports are increasingly expected to register how networked services, including applications, are being delivered. "Network reporting" is going beyond the network and reporting. Reporting is now expected to reflect real management tasks - from those delivered by planners and administrators, to those performed by more executive and business decision makers.
Some of the features in Concord's Network Health 4.5 that have caught my attention are application response management in various flavors, tiered reports for different classes of users (by title), some basic accounting capabilities and a portal approach to report customization.
Concord's application response includes support for observed and synthetic transactional application response management - from partners such as Ganymede, NetScout, Response, Cisco and FirstSense. (FirstSense is behind the PulseCheck agent in Network Health that takes a desktop, or end-user, perspective in monitoring application response.)

But what does all this really mean? Observed monitoring reflects actual application behavior. Effectively observed monitoring witnesses and documents. Synthetic transactions can be set to occur at various time intervals for applications, and as such they are "artificial." But synthetic transactions are more consistent and more easily controlled.

Each method has its advantages. Observed application response cannot, for instance, proactively tell you if an application is available. It can only occur when the application is invoked, or when it crosses a specific network segment. However, synthetic transactions reflect general conditions that are not as precise as individualized conditions for getting at the actual end-user experience, or getting at specific real-time conversations in individual network segments.

Concord has clearly made a significant investment in application response monitoring. The only cause for concern is that Concord has indicated that under some circumstances it will combine synthetic transactional and observed measurements into a single report. Since the metrics between these two approaches are far from evident, this may not be such a useful snapshot. This is all the more so since NetScout's approach to observed monitoring - based on Layer 7 conversations in a network segment - measure intentionally different metrics from PulseCheck, or FirstSense desktop agents "observing" specific end-user experiences.

It is a promising sign that Concord, along with several other vendors, are taking on the challenges of providing these more advanced requirements. And Network Health offers one of the most critical ingredients - a wide range of contextual approaches - for interpreting report-related information. An isolated piece of data, no matter how precise and accurate, remains just that. The most critical need is putting that data in a context that's relevant to decision making, and Concord has been working closely with its users to deliver on that requirement.

Dennis Drogseth is a director with Enterprise Management Associates,(www.enterprisemanagement.com), a leading analyst and market research firm based in Boulder, Colorado, focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management. Dennis has extensive experience in network management platforms and products and is researching trends in management software and changing IT roles internationally. His 18-plus years of experience in high-tech includes positions at IBM and Cabletron. He has been quoted in the press and is a speaker at industry events. He can be reached at drogseth@enterprisemanagement.com.

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