InfoVista Departs From Network-Centric Past

InfoVista upgrades Vista Portal; packages a set of pre-defined performance reports with its configuration manager.

Service level management provider InfoVista S.A. this week at the Networld + Interop trade show in Paris brought out the latest release of its Vista Portal and a set of pre-defined performance reports combined with its configuration manager. VistaPortal, the Paris-based companys flagship browser-based console, provides a centralized view of performance and service-level management data gathered from multiple InfoVista servers. Views can be customized for different types of users accessing the portal. The latest release, version 1.2, adds between 30 to 40 out-of-the-box reports on end-to-end performance, as well as resource monitoring. The reports are tailored for different roles, such as network engineers, CIOs, line-of-business managers and external customers. InfoVista also improved the tools navigational abilities, allowing users to drill down from group averages to the specific elements that make up those averages. The new release also adds guided analysis and animation that lets users know when lengthy reports are still running.
The new Vista Plug-in Family, which packages together a set of pre-defined performance reports with configuration management, represents a departure from InfoVistas network-centric past. The new plug-ins allow users to correlate server and network performance in real-time and create an integrated view. Users can view network, server and application utilization, response times and availability to more easily determine where to start troubleshooting problems. The correlation can help resolve finger-pointing among different groups. "From a strategic perspective, the plug-ins are key in creating a total solution set. InfoVista was previously just a network play in network monitoring and management," said Joshua Beil, vice president of research and development at Tier 1 Research in Santa Cruz, Calif. "This represents their efforts to gather data on monitoring servers and applications into their framework and reporting infrastructure. The integrated configuration manager is intended to act as a central point-of-command over InfoVista agents used to gather the performance data on servers. The agents, which run on Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris, IBMs AIX, HP-UX and Linux, can be distributed, updated and reconfigured centrally from the configuration manager. The plug-ins range from $300 to $550 per agent, including the reports. VistaPortal starts at $73,200, which includes five access licenses.