ForeCAST the future with Clairvoyant

Fortunetellers claim to predict the future by reading palms and tea leaves, or by casting the I-Ching, but rarely do they claim demonstrable Return on Investment for their efforts.

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On the other hand, capacity planning that predicts when WAN and other business services will require upgrades can save you lots of money. Capacity planning has gotten a nudge from the recent downturn in the economy but the practice still resembles tea-leaf reading than science.

This is because most management software that includes capacity planning capabilities are fairly broad in scope and treat the function as one of many services. Most of these tools are good for monitoring infrastructure performance and service levels, and some are good at troubleshooting problems at high levels, but their capacity planning information is usually at best a guideline. One reason is that many service level and performance management tools must address many parameters, so that the granular intervals for data collection that is ideal for capacity planning cannot be met.

One vendor, Clairvoyant Software, has developed a product called ForeCAST targeted at just that. Whether you call it capacity planning, service planning, or customer-facing service planning, the idea remains fairly consistent. One service provider, for instance, is using ForeCAST to monitor the T1 service it depends on for local DSL access. With a 30-day wait for a new T1 line, some level of precision in addressing real requirements is important in managing costs. Efficiency in managing this salient requirement enabled this vendor - one of the classically endangered competitive local exchange carriers - to grow successfully.

ForeCAST is a good product largely because of its very focused design. It interacts with digital and analog dial-up modems, remote access servers, VPN routers, broadband cable modems, Web servers and other devices, to monitor and predict the usage of a wide range of WAN links, such as ATM, frame relay and IP-VPN, as well as device-specific ones such as Web drivers.

Because ForeCAST samples at 30-second intervals, it can catch spikes that get lost through averages at longer intervals (typically five or fifteen minutes). For instance, if you look at the sequence 20, 25, 20, 35, 85, 20, 70, 15, 90 and 20, ForeCAST can catch the spokes of 85% and 70% that would get lost at an average of, say, 40%, at a ten-minute sampling.

The other most important feature of ForeCAST is its ability to associate similar resources into a single service assessment. For instance, many multiples of users can be associated into a single VPN group, so that ForeCAST's predictive algorithm can address the capacity of the VPN service as a whole. Similarly, multiple T1 lines can be combined into a single service, while single or multiple server farms can be amalgamated for e-business planning.

ForeCAST is also scalable because of its design for local or point of presence-specific servers that do local analysis, which is then fed to a central master server. This is useful for both service providers with distributed POPs and distributed enterprises.

ForeCAST Resource Manager is a good tool in part because it is a limited one. It does a good job of predicting network and server usage but doesn't attempt to do more. For instance, it doesn't show the impact of specific application services on the network, or do any troubleshooting or diagnostics, or try to monitor service-level agreement-specific data except that directly related to utilization of the networked infrastructure. Real-world deployments of ForeCAST cost about 25% of what most performance management solutions cost, and ForeCAST isn't intended to replace them. Clairvoyant's pricing is on a per element basis, with a rule-of-thumb of $100 per element.

If WAN dependency is a major part of your business ForeCAST is certainly worth a look.

Dennis Drogseth is a director with Enterprise Management Associates, 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 via e-mail.

Audrey Rasmussen is a research director with Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colorado, a leading analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management. Audrey has more than 20 years of experience working with distributed systems, applications and networks. Her current focus at EMA is e-business, SMB/SME and MSPs. She can be reached via e-mail.

Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colorado, is a leading analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management software and services.

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