Menlo Park, California-based Network General Corp will find it an uphill struggle to get itself taken seriously when its flagship product is called Sniffer, and it could find that a few more guffaws greet the news that it has now added expert system technology to the local and wide area network diagnostic system: the company says that the Expert Sniffer technology opens the door for a broader range of network managers to use highly sophisticated network management tools, enabling them to attack com-plex problems with far less training and expertise; the software-only technology will be integrated into the current Sniffer Network Analyser for local and wide area nets and the Distributed Sniffer System with a software upgrade; the Expert Sniffer technology is implemented using an approach built on the requirements of a realtime expert analysis system which has the ability to learn individual characteristics of a given network and apply that knowledge to problem resolution, using an adaptation of expert technologies, including blackboard knowledge and a semantic network of objects; first ships for Ethernet and Token Ring, are set for first half 1992; the thing has not yet been given a price.
