New Track for Eye of the Storm

Entuity Inc. will try to bring its triple play of performance, availability and resource management of enterprise networks to the CIO with the latest release of its Eye of the Storm software.

Version 3.5 of the fault management and reporting system, which will be shown for the first time this week at the NetWorld+Interop show in Las Vegas, emphasizes rich reporting functions as well as greater integration with Cisco Systems Inc.s Service Assurance Agent probe.

Although Entuity has gained traction primarily among network operators and engineers, new Flex Reports allow users to mine the tools extensive database of performance, availability and resource information to answer a variety of management questions, according to Bill Tracy, vice president of product strategy, in Boston.

At least one customer agreed that the rich reporting is useful for executives. "It does allow you to provide very clear information about the performance of your network in terms of utilization [and] availability," said Bob Odenheimer, senior vice president of IT operations at Magellan Health Services Inc., in Columbia, Md. "So I can provide a picture from actual statistics of each component of the network and be able to provide them with availability statistics that I can back up."

New Flex Reports build on Eye of the Storms style sheets for Essential Reports. The style sheets are used to simplify the creation of more sophisticated reports from the tools integrated historical database. The Flex Reports add configuration templates that allow users to generate more customized reports.

"You can change things like the layout of the report, or the time frame the report is run. Users just have to know what theyd like to see," said Tracy.

The integrated database in Eye of the Storm allows the tool to provide not only performance and availability data but assets—and their relationships to one another—as well, according to Tracy.

The integration with Ciscos SAA allows the tool to gather more detailed information on jitter, echo and packet loss, which can affect the quality of voice-over-IP traffic. The tool also simplifies configuration of the Cisco probes and allows routers associated with a specific application to be monitored as a group. Release 3.5 of Eye of the Storm, due this summer, runs on Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 as well as Microsoft Corp.s Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It starts at about $50,000.

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