InfoVista S.A. this week at NetWorld+ Interop will bring more comprehensive performance management to Wi-Fi environments when the company releases its Wireless Fidelity Service Level Management suite.
The suite can automatically discover Wi-Fi access points, measure them for bandwidth use and signal strength, and collect performance data. It is intended for Wi-Fi service providers as well as enterprises running wireless mission-critical applications.
InfoVista integrated Wi-Fi support across its portfolio of products, which includes InfoVista Server, VistaPortal, Vista Plug-in for IP Services and VistaDiscovery.
Wi-Fi VistaViews in InfoVista Server will let users determine what data to collect on Wi-Fi performance, what analysis to perform on that data and what actions to take.
The VistaDiscovery component can find and help monitor access points. In Vista Plug-ins for IP Services, InfoVista added the ability to actively test Wi-Fi services to measure end-user experience. Active agents in the plug-ins can monitor whether a Wi-Fi access point can handle voice communications, said officials, in Columbia, Md.
Such comprehensive performance monitoring and management of Wi-Fi puts InfoVista in the lead among management tools providers, said Joshua Beil, an analyst with Tier 1 Research Inc., in Minneapolis. “There are others that can do various monitoring on the Wi-Fi side, but as a service-level-management tool, theyre leading the charge,” Beil said.
Along with the Wi-Fi support, InfoVista at the Las Vegas show will debut its Service Level Navigator, a dynamic GUI that can link real-time performance of network elements to quality-of-service measurements grouped by geographic region, customer or line of business. The interface can pull together management data collected by third-party tools, allowing operators to use a common interface to simplify trouble-shooting.
That can help improve productivity and lower costs, said early user Ralph Cramer, business unit executive at German systems integrator Danet GmbH, in Weiterstadt.
InfoVista will also introduce its VistaOperations Center, which can identify potential performance problems; determine whether a problem is in the network, server or application; and determine what resources are associated with the problem. All the new offerings are available now.
“It lets us understand whos talking to whom. We can tell if there is one group getting slow response times; we can see which business flows are affected by a hardware or component-level problem and vice versa,” said an InfoVista spokesman.