Concord’s eHealth

When it comes to WAN monitoring tools for heterogeneous networks, Concord’s eHealth is the Reviewmeister’s tool of choice.

EHealth includes four modules – LiveHealth, Network Health, System Health and Application Health.

Network Health monitors the performance and availability of WAN interfaces, routers, switches, frame relay circuits and remote access equipment.

System Health monitors servers and selected (or all) clients to alert administrators to application performance problems, server crashes and disk space shortages.

Application Health is a transaction-oriented collection of tools that help determine the cause of poor application response times. At a default of 5-minute intervals (or at a rate you can set), eHealth actively polls SNMP-aware devices to determine their status and displays the result in real time.

EHealth recognizes and understands more than 900 management information base (MIB) definitions. It uses these MIBs to determine device performance and availability. Initially, eHealth collects network activity and inventory data to build a normal network baseline. Thereafter, using a complex but configurable rules set, it detects and highlights exceptional activity patterns, such as excessively high or low traffic through a router or switch port.

The Network Health frame relay module efficiently and accurately collected network statistics from the DSU/CSUs in our WAN links. EHealth’s many reports showed us WAN link data such as top talkers, packet discards, congestion, overall utilization and utilization by DLCI (average, minimum and maximum). We found that eHealth also understands and can monitor DSL connections.

While the other tools presented native Windows interfaces, Concord’s eHealth server console used The SCO Group’s Xvision PC X server. But growing accustomed to PC X takes only a short while. EHealth’s expandable combination of tree-view window and associated detail windows gave us quick access to network segment and device details, and current status. EHealth obviously is intended for large networks. For example, we found we could sort eHealth’s display of network devices by IP address or class, which helped make working with populous segments much easier. Creating circuit-specific presentations of uptime and bandwidth utilization is easy with eHealth.

Using IP address ranges you specify, eHealth automatically discovers WAN link devices. In our tests, eHealth’s discovery process occurred daily, on a schedule we could set or, if we wished, interactively. During each sweep of the network, eHealth automatically discovered new or changed device information. EHealth eased the process of identifying network devices by letting us categorize network elements by class or IP address grouping. It then performed a discovery process to find those elements on the network.

For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2003/1006rev.html