The Network Intelligence Suite is the way the San Jose, California-based company now packages its internally developed Visualizer product, for analysis of data from both the Sniffer real-time and InfiniStream retrospective appliances, with the NetVigil software for looking at the performance of apps and services on a network, acquired in February last year when it bought Fidelia Technology Inc.
It collects information on device health and log files, as well as Windows Device Management (WMI) data, said James Messer of the Fidelia technology, Network General’s technical marketing manager.
It also does synthetic actions such as sending queries to test a database, which is something you can’t get with SNMP. Visualizer and NetVigil, both of which are now at v4.2, are still available separately, but clearly there will be bundling discounts for buying both.
Beyond this announcement, Network General will unveil what it calls its networkNDA architecture, a strategy to make its products’ performance analysis data available to other apps through APIs. At its heart will be the creation of a performance management database (PMDB) as the repository which security, compliance and other apps will be able to consult for their own purposes, through an API.
The rationale is clearly one of increasing return on investment on Network General products by increasing their usefulness beyond their traditional domain. It is no coincidence that Network General has given the repository a name that associates it with the configuration management database (CMDB) concept championed by systems management framework vendors as the font of all knowledge, both for running systems and network and to tie in with ID and access management suites.
With a CMDB customers can watch what’s happening on their networks, but they have no real-time metrics on performance, so the PMDB could be a data source for the CMDB in that context, said Network General’s CTO Ken Boyd.
