NetVigil is especially good at relating business functions to network components, applications and servers. It uses the concept of business containers to show how network problems affect specific business workflows and groups of users.

NetVigil primarily uses SNMP to gather device statistics and health information. Each time NetVigil emitted an alert, it clearly displayed the business functions associated with the failing infrastructure components. Furthermore, NetVigil is geared to send notifications to both IT staff and business community staff.

Once we created a container for each business function in our simulated midsize company, we assigned network infrastructure elements to business functions by putting the elements into the containers. The process is a tedious one for a large company, but you can argue that it's a one-time arduous process that does offer obvious benefits. Thereafter, NetVigil presented us with highly useful correlations between network faults and the various workflow units of our simulated company. We could easily tell, for instance, that a WAN link outage had idled a particular sales office, or that the auditing department was causing high traffic levels at specific times of the day.

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NetVigil's event-management console offers status grouping, severity filters and one-click drilldown to help pinpoint network problems. We liked that NetVigil presents a separate dashboard for each container as well as summaries for multiple containers.