How we tested the Oculan 250 network appliance.
We installed the monitoring appliance on our lab’s six-segment Fast Ethernet network. Each segment consists of a server and 25 clients along with SNMP-aware switch, router, DSU/CSU and an SNMP-aware hardware probe. To access the Oculan 250’s Web-based user interface, we used Internet Explorer 6.0.
In our evaluation, we primarily looked for the ability to monitor the health and availability of our servers and network devices. We tested problem notification via pager and e-mail (single address and multiple recipients), as well as the appliance’s ability to produce reports that establish baselines, show available and unavailable devices, log device availability histories and identify trends. We used @stake’s NetCat 1.1 and Rain Forest Puppy’s Whisker 1.4 for Windows to trigger the intrusion detection system, and we set up security-deficient servers to test the appliance’s vulnerability assessment component.
Back to main review: “Delivering ‘plug-and-play’ network monitoring”
