SMARTS adds security to its suite

Service management software maker SMARTS this week released a software tool to help enterprise network managers monitor and maintain security devices across their infrastructure.

InCharge for Security Infrastructure Management is a software add-on to SMARTS’ (System Management Arts) flagship security assurance InCharge software. InCharge Security Infrastructure Management monitors the status, health, availability and changes of security devices in enterprise networks. The first generation of the product can monitor security devices from companies such as Cisco, Check Point and Nokia.

Peter Cruz, SMARTS director of enterprise marketing, says the new release will compete with software from the likes of Micromuse and its Netcool for Security Management software. SMARTS is looking to help network managers bring security health, availability and status information into a network topology. Pinpointing the location of the security device via InCharge will speed problem identification and resolution for SMARTS’ customers, Cruz says.

“We are looking to address all the issues in the environment. We are not securing the network per se, but we will assure that the security infrastructure is healthy and available, which can go toward protecting the network,” Cruz says. He says SMARTS can offer users the network discovery and topology mapping that other security event management tools don’t provide. “Security information can be pushed into InCharge, and then the software will associate the security events with topological elements,” he says.

Security Infrastructure Management plugs into SMARTS InCharge. Once loaded onto a server, the InCharge software begins an auto-discovery process on the network, seeking out alarms, Management Information Base variables, SNMP event data, system log data or data from security devices and other security management software. The software is written to include information about each managed element and the potential problems than can occur. It searches for “symptoms” of those problems with network-independent object models.

The product performs firewall performance monitoring to determine the health of components such as processors, memory, disks, file systems, applications and interfaces. The change control and policy monitoring features gather information and send alerts regarding changes made. It also performs session-level aggregation of events. An event management feature consolidates security-related event information and associates the events in a topological context.

Security Infrastructure Management software can also work with either pure security tools or products from security managers vendors such as netForensics, e-Security and Intellitactics.

InCharge Security Infrastructure Management is scheduled to be available March 31. It’s an add-on to the InCharge suite and requires enterprise users to have InCharge. Pricing varies on network configuration and can range from $40,000 to $60,000.