Advanced net analysis wares on tap at Interop

Network professionals attending Interop this week will get a look at a slew of products designed to take network troubleshooting to the next level as network management vendors pump up wares with advanced application, voice and virtualization analysis.

Performance-management vendor NetScout has readied an update to its nGenius Analytics product, which the company unveiled at last year’s show. Version 1.2 of the appliance developed from technology NetScout acquired with Quantiva now adds VoIP quality metrics, application-response times and decreases to the network-performance metrics it collects across an enterprise to help IT managers get a view of end-to-end application-performance management.

The product, previously offered only as a stand-alone appliance, can now be purchased bundled with NetScout’s nGenius Performance Manager product, which can be bought as software or preconfigured as an appliance on optimized hardware. Coupling the two applications, NetScout says, provides deeper network and application analysis, enabling it to send early warnings to network managers on potential VoIP degradations, application-response slowdowns and anomalous network behavior.

With competition from Network General, Network Physics and others, NetScout says it needs to continue to advance the application intelligence in its products and help network managers get ahead of performance issues.

“We have added the ability to start tracking and watching for the presence of previously unrecognized and uncategorized traffic,” says Jim Frey, NetScout vice president of marketing. “The analytics can alarm on the unknown in essence and help network managers get ahead of performance problems.”

Available now, pricing for nGenius Analytics 1.2 starts at $50,000.

Netreo

Another vendor at Interop making news around deeper network analysis capabilities is Netreo.

The vendor, which offers its software suite packaged on an appliance or delivered as a hosted service, this week will make available OmniCenter Flow. The product offers NetFlow traffic monitoring to help network managers gain visibility into application-traffic patterns, monitor traffic volume, tune infrastructure architecture and better allocate network resources, the company says.

According to Cisco, “NetFlow provides a set of services for IP applications, including network traffic accounting, use-based network billing, network planning, security, -monitoring capabilities, and network monitoring.” The network giant included the feature in its router operating systems to help customers get “valuable information about network users and applications, peak usage times, and traffic routing,” Cisco says.

Such vendors as NetScout, Network General, Network Instruments and SolarWinds have added support for NetFlow, and Netreo expects to add support for sFlow data as well in future releases.

For Netreo, NetFlow support in OmniCenter Flow offers knowledge on the Cisco protocol in a simple form factor. “The appliance is easy to install and maintain or the service does the monitoring for network managers,” says Kevin Kinsey, Netreo CEO.

Available now, OmniCenter Flow can cost between $5,000 and $10,000 in a software-as-a-service-delivery model or between $20,000 and $50,000 when packaged on hardware.

Netcordia

Netcordia, maker of NetMRI network-health-analysis appliances, this week will enter the real-time analytics market with an update to its flagship network-management product.

NetMRI installs on a switch port or router interface and identifies network devices and the ports, or interfaces, used to route traffic across the net. Network managers input the blocks of IP addresses for the appliance to monitor, and the appliance begins collecting data such as CPU use, routing table information, VLAN activities, MAC addresses and port connections. The appliances are packaged with software, and until recently would run in a scheduled manner, for instance, to report on changes to network configuration overnight or when troubleshooting a performance issues.

Now NetMRI Version 2.2 — which performs an automated series of health checks of network devices such as routers, switches and firewalls — can run in a real-time manner, offering analysis on events as they occur.

“We had gotten feedback from our customers that they wanted to see a more real-time component in NetMRI. For instance, if they address a problem, they wanted to see it resolved and the results of that in NetMRI immediately,” explains Terry Slattery, Netcordia CTO and founder.

Also with this release, customers can get the benefits of Netcordia’s recent integration with Splunk and its IT management data-search technology. According to Slattery, this integration will enable NetMRI uses to click through Netcordia’s appliance and get data collected by Splunk’s software. The software searches for management data across logs, message queues, configuration files, SNMP traps and database transactions to more quickly correlate events that could be related to a failure — and that network managers would typically have to search manually.

“It is a true integration in that the interface is the look and feel of Netcordia, but the technology is Splunk, and it will search the network for additional information when network managers click on an analysis button in NetMRI,” Slattery explains.

NetMRI 2.2 is scheduled to be generally available by late June, and pricing starts at about $25,000.

WildPackets

For its part, network protocol-analysis vendor WildPackets says it will provide a window into the invisible traffic traversing networks, hidden in virtual servers.

OmniAnalysis 5, the vendor’s suite of network-analysis tools, now includes the Omni Virtual Network Service, which captures network traffic on virtual servers. Because traffic among virtual servers doesn’t cross over a network segment where it can be easily captured, network managers tasked to troubleshoot a problem will be blind to issues in that environment, says John Bennett, WildPackets vice president of marketing.

“Now network managers can capture that traffic and bring it into our product for analysis,” he says.

Also new to this release is support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n networks.

OmniAnalysis 5 suite is scheduled to be available at the end of June, and pricing for applications within the suite can range from $7,000 to about $30,000.