NetVigil is especially good at relating business functions to network components, applications and servers.
NetVigil primarily uses 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.
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.
NetVigil’s discovery process was quick and accurate. It inventoried our devices, applications and servers and properly detected the relationships among the components. It correctly identified our servers, routers, printers and file systems as well as multiple redundant paths in the network.
The discovery process notes the capabilities, size and capacity of each network component. It also identifies software processes running on each computer.
NetVigil notified us via e-mail or pager about detected issues. When we caused extremely brief error conditions, such as excessive CPU utilization, it was smart enough to suppress transient threshold breaches (such as momentarily exceeding a threshold but then returning to normal). NetVigil’s problem escalation feature ensures that if front-line troubleshooters do not respond to a persisting problem, other IT staff and business community staff in the organization will be alerted.
NetVigil’s reports show network event histories and problem resolutions, and provide useful data to capacity planners. Business community people will find the reports showing network events and activity levels for each business container (such as department or workflow unit) highly illuminating.
NetVigil comes with clear and comprehensive online documentation. It installed in less than an hour.
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