NETWORK WORLD FUSION FOCUS: NEAL WEINBERG on
PRODUCT REVIEW OF THE WEEK
12/12/00 - Today's Focus: Concord Communications' LiveHealth

Dear Wincenty 
Kaminski,

In this issue:

* LiveHealth reports real-time network events
* Experts Exchange
* Links related to Product Review of the Week
* IT Job Spot(tm): Assess Your Leadership Skills


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Today's Focus: Concord Communications' LiveHealth
---------------------------------------------------------------
By Neal Weinberg

For the Reviewmeister, there's nothing like the smell of real-
time data in the morning.

Historical data is nice, but it's real-time data that gets the
blood pumping. So, we took a close look at LiveHealth from
Concord Communications. LiveHealth collects real-time data and
reports it in an easy-to-understand, comprehensive and timely
fashion.

Like any new product, LiveHealth has its pros and cons. It
produces excellent reports and supports more than 500 kinds of
SNMP-aware devices. But it can't display a network's topology,
doesn't offer corrective actions, and wasn't all that easy to
install.

LiveHealth starts at $35,000, and is part of Concord's suite
that includes Network Health, System Health and Application
Health modules.

LiveHealth actively polls SNMP-manageable devices, determines
their status and condition, and displays the result in real
time. LiveHealth can present its reports via a browser-based
interface, a server-based console and Adobe Acrobat-based
reports. It also can send device status and condition data to
network management products such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView.

LiveHealth is complex software. In addition to its
sophisticated network monitoring and reporting elements, it
comes with the CERN Web server for rendering management data
and reports as Web pages, an Open Ingres database engine for
storing network device data, and The Santa Cruz Operation's
XVision PC Xserver, which LiveHealth's server console uses to
display screen data.

LiveHealth's discovery process is quick and accurate. By
default, LiveHealth discovers network nodes daily at midnight.
At 5-minute intervals (or less often, if you wish), the SNMP
polling process probes the condition and status of network
devices. LiveHealth understands a plethora of Management
Information Bases, and it correctly recognized Lucent and Cisco
routers, Samsung and 3Com switches, and the other devices in
our test network.

LiveHealth can tell you if a device is performing as it's
supposed to, but it can't produce graphical maps showing
network hierarchies. It stores collected network device
information for six weeks in the Open Ingres database.

In its first few days, LiveHealth builds a baseline of normal
network behavior. Then, it can detect out-of-the-ordinary
events, such as excessively high or low traffic through a
router or switch port.

Once LiveHealth detects a problem, a network administrator can
choose to monitor the problem device in what Concord calls
"fast mode." LiveHealth polls the device in frequencies up to
twice a minute to help the administrator track the situation.

LiveHealth doesn't offer external alerting functions, such as
e-mail or paging, but relies instead on links to third-party
programs (such as HP's OpenView) to provide such notifications
or take corrective actions.

The strength of the program is reports that show device
information by time period, relationship to the organizational
structure and type of behavior or exception. We could see
devices that had experienced problems, by type of problem, as
well as those associated with a particular application.

LiveHealth runs on HP-UX, Solaris, Windows NT and 2000. The
documentation is comprehensive, but should include a better
roadmap to help users find the various software component
discussions in the manuals.

LiveHealth's installation was more difficult than we expected,
but we found that LiveHealth's focus on performance and its
extensive reporting are just what the doctor ordered.

For the full review, go to
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2000/1127rev3.html

To contact Neal Weinberg:
----------------------
Neal Weinberg is features editor at Network World, in charge
of product reviews, Buyer's Guides, technology primers,
how-tos, issue-oriented feature stories and the Technology
Insider series. You can reach him at mailto:nweinber@nww.com.

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FOR RELATED LINKS -- Click here for Network World's home page:
http://www.nwfusion.com
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Got a technical question related to new technology on your
corporate network? Post it at Experts Exchange on Fusion at
http://nwfusion.experts-exchange.com/. Another network
professional may have the solution to your problem.

Concord's MyHealth ties net mgmt. tools together
Network World, 05/29/00
http://www.nwfusion.com/archive/2000/97754_05-29-2000.html

Concord unveils Exchange management app
Network Systems Management newsletter, 11/06/00
http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/nsm/2000/1106nm1.html


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