Aprisma Management Technologies Inc. next week will use its annual customer conference to unveil several improvements to its flagship Spectrum product that are designed to help companies get a better feel for what’s on their network and why it might be underperforming.
Add-on software dubbed Spectrum Report Manager, which will debut at Aprisma’s Las Vegas event, exploits the map of SNMP-manageable devices provided by Spectrum to generate reports on device change and configuration. Much like tools from companies such as AlterPoint Inc. and Goldwire Technology Inc., the software tracks adds, changes and moves made to devices and monitors configurations across network elements from vendors such as Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. Users can configure the reporting software to assimilate data collected by Spectrum into reports that show how network changes affect service levels, Aprisma says.
“Management vendors need to incorporate change and configuration into their core products to make a comprehensive management system work,” says Glenn O’Donnell, program director at Meta Group Inc. He says adding new products that will relate configuration to performance and other features in Spectrum will help Aprisma better compete with Smarts and Micromuse.
Aprisma, which expects about 300 attendees at its conference this week, also will show off Spectrum 7.1. One featured addition is called Technology Relationship Mapping, technology that lets Spectrum, with the use of agent software, provide a topological map of relationships between infrastructure devices, applications and servers.
Aprisma also has added two intelligent analysis features to Spectrum. Condition Correlation Technology uses Spectrum’s policy-based engine to identify conditions (defined as not just a single event but patterns of events) and explain causal relationships among events to determine the root cause of performance problems. Business Service Intelligence provides customers with real-time analysis of how network reliability and availability affects customers and service-level agreements.
The company, once part of Cabletron and closely tied to fellow Cabletron spin-off Enterasys Networks Inc., is now owned by holding company Gores Technology Group.
Spectrum Report Manager and the Spectrum 7.1 releases are expect this month. Pricing begins at US$25,000 for all of the applications.