Entuity’s Eye of the Storm is not new, as the company has offered network management products for more than five years. But it’s clearly one of the more elegant products monitoring networked infrastructure for availability, performance, service effectiveness and resource awareness. Moreover, Entuity is beginning to thrive in both mid-tier and very large enterprises, with sales volumes growing substantially.

Why is this?

The short answer is “deployability” (to coin a word), adaptability to change, accuracy and relevance. Eye of the Storm can actually be up and running in very large environments in as little as half an hour. Some managed service providers have confided that they have used Eye to discover client infrastructures and assess infrastructure performance - and from this, set prices. Then, once the contract is signed they leave Eye in place to monitor the infrastructure. Eye’s dynamic capabilities for capturing infrastructure inventory and interdependencies also enable a versatile set of visualization options - through reports and queries that can cover inventory and asset information, availability and performance information and service impact information.

Eye of the Storm is geared towards Layer 2 and 3 discovery, and application service discovery as viewed from Layer 4. It utilizes an open an accessible Event Manager, for monitoring and filtering events, and a Data Management Kernel (DMK), which is the core of Entuity’s analytic engine. The DMK can direct the Event Manager as well as the polling engine based on dynamically changing conditions. Through automated trending, Eye can “learn” behavior patterns across the networked infrastructure, including those patterns associated with specific application services, and establish what’s normal and what deviates from normal - which of course can generate an alert.

Entuity uses data models for many hundreds of devices - including switches, routers, and hubs - with availability and connectivity awareness of servers and applications. These out-of-the box models can be extended to fit specific customer requirements when needed to address critical new device types. Reports can range from core inventory and asset reports, to capacity and resource utilization reports, to reports designed to provide insights into troubleshooting for performance and availability. The product also provides what Entuity calls “Flex Reports,” in which administrators and operators can interact directly with the DMK to generate new reports - for instance, to help in problem isolation - on the fly. Browser-based “Interactive Queries” are targeted at both NOC personnel and help desk staff, with drill-down capabilities to enable further interrogation of Eye’s integrated database.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.