SMARTS does protocol management

SMARTS last week unveiled at Supercomm a product the company says can help IT managers monitor and correlate network protocols at the routing layer.

SMARTS InCharge Network Protocol Manager (NPM) works with the company’s IP Availability Manager and Service Assurance Manager software to report on routing issues such as misconfigurations, software problems and connectivity failures. SMARTS says NPM can provide insight into routing process and adjacency failures, pinpointing problems in routing protocol domains and correlating those with the underlying IP network.

“There aren’t a lot of products for managing protocols available. There are some that may watch and monitor protocols, but they are typically unable to correlate back how routing relates to the infrastructure,” says Darren Orzechoski, vice president of corporate marketing at SMARTS.

NPM uses InCharge IP Availability Manager to populate the NPM topology and forward relevant events to NPM. The software discovers devices running instances of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) or Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol and the interfaces being used for routing updates. It also discovers BGP and OSPF neighbors and adjacencies, and analyzes router configurations for errors. For example, SMARTS says NPM can spot neighbors on the same network with different maximum transmitted unit (MTU) values configured on their OSPF interfaces, which would cause a routing and performance problem.

NPM can also correlate failures in Availability Manager to the impact in NPM. For example, a cable failure between two OSPF peers would generate an impact of “OSPF_adjacency>disconnected,” according to SMARTS.

“NPM performs correlation at the routing and the network layer,” Orzechoski says.

The software uses SMARTS’ Codebook Correlation analytics engine as well as the InCharge Common Information Model (ICIM) design to show the relationship between routing and the infrastructure, he says. ICIM models the routing protocol domain, and the correlation engine identifies the source of alarms generated in the domain.

NPM requires customers also use InCharge 6.0. The software supports Unix, Windows and Linux operating systems. Available now, pricing for InCharge NPM starts at $25,000.