Put things into Perspective

The one sure thing about networks is that they grow continuously. They're like weeds in a summer garden, only harder to keep under control.

Needless to say, there are bulky frameworks you can deploy to manage your network, or point products to mix and match into best-of-breed monitoring mayhem. The first approach is costly, time consuming and requires significant in-house expertise; the second way may cost less, but still requires time and specialized in-house smarts.

Is there a third way? Perhaps.

On September 4 San Francisco-based PacketTrap Networks Inc. will release its new network management and troubleshooting product Perspective. According to Matt Bolton, vice president of products, the software automatically discovers what's on your network, profiles the devices and through its smart policies feature, automatically categorizes your network systems. That is, it will put all of your Exchange servers into one tabbed section of a user's dashboard view and your Cisco routers into another tabbed view, etcetera. Naturally, Perspectives views and categories all can be customized.

Bolton says once Perspective is installed on a Windows server, it creates a baseline of your network over a period of time that you set. He says the baseline helps reduce false positive alerts because Perspective will know, for example, when spikes occur in your network and won't make a fuss. The baseline can also be used to alert you when anyone has added unauthorized software on the network, a nice extra benefit.

Another neat little feature is Perspective's ranking of your top ten problems. It can list them by your overall network issues or, if you happen to be the Exchange administrator, the top ten issues currently affecting Microsoft's mail server.

You can monitor local as well as remote networks and even run your diagnostic tools remotely.

Pricing starts at $2,000.