Aiming to better marry network monitoring and application performance management across its product line, Network General today unveiled Network Intelligence Suite, a melding of NetVigil 4.2 and Visualizer 4.2, as well as VoIP Foresnics, the first of several forthcoming Business Container additions to NIS.
Network General bought Fidelia last February, and with that acquired the NetVigil business-service monitoring technology that's now part of NIS. That combination has yielded a solution providing application monitoring integrated with traditional packet-level network and application traffic analysis capabilities.
The end-result, according to Network General, is that IT admins can with NIS enjoy a full view of the overall health of the network, then can drill down and determine specifically what's causing an application to underperform.
"Managing application performance and availability is getting more complex with many architectural styles, such as SOA and others. This introduces a lot more moving parts that can affect application performance and availability, said Milind Govekar, research VP at Gartner. "However, certain IT components, such as the network, are always blamed for poor performance. Thus it is important for IT to invest in application management tools that not only allow them to measure and monitor end user application performance, but also provide root cause analysis capability to proactively identify and rectify application performance problems."
Exemplifying the APM that Network General has melded with Visualizer is the birth of VoIP Forensics, which Network General says gives admins a window for deeply tracking and troubleshooting voice over IP performance, including common statistics such as MOSS score, in real time. It can also send alerts when performance degrades to particular levels.
VoIP Forensics is one of the company's Business Containers, part of the company's Business Forensics solution. Forthcoming containers will deliver drill-down performance views for service level agreements, virtualized environments, and others.
The Network Intelligence Suite, VoIP Forensics, and the 4.2 version of the latest products will be generally available on September 22.
Posted by Ted Samson on September 18, 2006 02:29 PM
