By Steve Ragan Mar 15, 2007, 15:04 GMT
One of the things that are needed most on a corporate network is security. There is need for internal security, external security, systems auditing and monitoring, and more. A whole host of programs and companies today attempt to resolve these needs with specialized products and services, as is the case with Network Instruments. Network Instruments, is a known vendor for large scale IT departments. The products offered by them are used every day in network intelligence.
On Wednesday, Network Instruments released Observer, which will go hand-in-hand with another security tool GigaStor. The Observer Reporting Server connects to multiple Observer Suite consoles and aggregates the critical network performance metrics into an overall view of network health. Providing an easy-to-access view of network performance, Observer then creates reports segmented by individual business units, user groups, or infrastructure types. Allowing network managers the option to view bandwidth utilization or application use by department and take action if needed.
“The Reporting Server with Observer answers the need of enterprise to quickly move from high-level performance monitoring to root-cause analysis,” said Douglas Smith, president of Network Instruments. “With the Reporting Server the network team can view their global network, and within a few clicks they can drill down to isolate any problem on the network.”
Network Instruments has also expanded the retrospective network analysis capabilities of GigaStor to identify security breaches. GigaStor “operates like a security camera recording everything traversing the network for future analysis. With post-capture Security Forensics, GigaStor determines whether a security breach has occurred by comparing the historically captured traffic against a list of thousands of known attacks and anomalies. If a breach has been identified, GigaStor provides drill-down analysis to determine the source and time of the occurrence,” Network Instruments said in a statement.
“With Security Forensics, GigaStor can now conduct expert analysis for network, application, and security issues, identify the problem, and eliminate the guess work for IT managers,” said Charles Thompson, manager of sales engineering at Network Instruments.
Observer now includes support for Avaya CCMS and Nortel UNIStim protocols as well as providing long-term trending for call detail records (CDR). Many organizations use Observer for monitoring application performance and isolating application problems. It now offers integrated support for Microsoft Networking (Server Message Block), in addition to Citrix, Oracle, VoIP, Microsoft Exchange, HTTP, DNS, SQL, FTP, POP3, Telnet, SMTP, and SNMP. Managers can also set triggers and alarms on any application metric, ensuring they know about application problems before users are affected.
The cost is about average for what you would expect for infrastructure security monitoring and research. GigaStor is around $20,000 for a two-port configuration. Observer Standard is $995. Observer Expert, with over 70 VoIP-specific metrics, MultiHop Analysis, MPLS Analysis, Application Analysis, and Stream Reconstruction, is $2,895. Observer Suite, with an SNMP console and Web Reporting, is $3,995. More details on the Network Instruments website. www.networkinstruments.com
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