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Network operators looking to ease the integration and use of operations support and monitoring tools are getting special attention from vendors prepping new products and services this week.
Performance reporting provider InfoVista SA is set to demonstrate new integration between its service-level reporting software and best-of-breed operational support system tools.
At the NetWorld+Interop show in Las Vegas this week, the New York company will launch its initiative to package the expertise and services of its own integration consultants into prebuilt integrations. The packages include service activation, provisioning, fault management, customer management as well as billing and mediation OSS tools from a variety of vendors.
The first tools in the planned VistaLink suite provide integration between the InfoVista Service Assurance service-level reporting software and service activation software from Cisco Systems Inc. and Orchestream Ltd. The integration is intended to reduce operational costs and to help service providers more easily show customers the actual service levels they are receiving from the service providers value-added IP VPN services.
“It saves money because we dont have to develop a Corba bus [between InfoVista and the Orchestream service activator]. But we are still going to have to use a systems integrator to roll it out,” said Orchestream user Mabel Brooks, senior product manager for Telewest Communications plcs IP VPN service in Peterborough, England.
The new offerings include VistaLink for Cisco Systems Inc.s VPN Solution Center and VistaLink for Orchestream Service Activator. InfoVista will add another VistaLink for Micromuse Inc.s NetCool/Omnibus, and it plans over the next 12 months to have VistaLinks with major vendors in each of the five OSS functional areas.
Meanwhile, BMC Software Inc. and Micromuse from their respective application performance management and network management corners will move into each others turf with their own new service monitoring and reporting tools.
Micromuse this week will branch out from its network management roots into systems monitoring and management with its new NetCool System Service Monitors for Unix, Linux and Windows NT/2000 servers.
The San Francisco company, which had resold systems management tools from Concord Communications Inc., is adding new server-based agents that monitor internal system metrics, perform analysis and take automated actions in response to system problems. Such actions can include changing a system configuration, restarting a stalled process or executing a script. Micromuse also enhanced its Internet Service Monitor, which provides response time monitoring of Internet services, to monitor more complex Web sites with dynamic URLs, monitor complex Web transactions and record transaction sequences for creating scripts for active testing. Last week, Micromuse announced a new suite of NetCool/Usage Service Monitors, which takes real-time and historical measurements and analyzes usage data. The suite is intended to allow enterprises to understand how expensive network resources are being used by different applications, departments or business units.
BMC this week adds a new service reporting module that focuses on network services. The Patrol Service Reporting for Networks module integrates network performance data with performance data on applications, databases and Web servers. Together they provide a consolidated view of all the elements that support a given service.
The new module, part of BMCs Application Centric Network Management initiative, integrates with the Patrol Service Reporting modules for database, application and response time information. Using the same data repository, users can combine the data from each into single reports.
“Customers cant afford to be integrators anymore. Now the pendulum has swung back to single-vendor solutions,” said Gerry Roy director of product management for BMC network products in Houston.