Network Instruments works to provide customers with the much-sought-after ‘single pane of glass’ by combining network performance data with infrastructure health and availability metrics.
Network Instruments this week introduced a product designed to provide IT operations managers with a complete picture of the health and performance of their network devices as well as the infrastructure components.
How far has virtual systems management come?
Network Instruments unveiled its Observer Infrastructure product, which works with the company’s Observer Reporting Server, to perform infrastructure and resource monitoring tasks in enterprise IT environments. Available as software or an appliance, Observer Infrastructure can auto-discover, map and monitor devices as well as track their performance and availability. The product uses standards such as SNMP, WMI and WSD to obtain device performance and status metrics and is able to help IT managers priorities device problems based upon their potential impact on business services, according to Douglas Smith, president of Network Instruments.
“We took a look at what IT managers need to do complete performance analysis. We come from the world of packet capture and analysis, which is critical, but there is another world of infrastructure management,” Smith says. “We saw that some of our larger customers were using point tools to bring that type of data into our Observer Reporting Server so we decided to bring the capabilities into our own product family.”
Observer Infrastructure comes in a couple of forms, software and appliances. The enterprise version is delivered as an appliance that can poll both locally and remotely. The Observer Infrastructure enterprise server would then send the information it gathers from the environment to the Observer Reporting Server. Depending on the size of the environment, customers can also deploy appliances that would collect data locally in the area in which they are installed, crunch the data and send it encrypted to the enterprise server.
“IT managers can deploy the product in such a way to avoid polling across the network for efficiency and security,” Smith says.
Available now, the Observer Reporting Server appliance costs $25,000. The Observer Infrastructure appliance is priced at $17,500, and to additional appliances or software range in price depending on the number of devices managed.
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