NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: NEAL WEINBERG
on PRODUCT REVIEWS
10/23/01 - Today's focus: NetScout's nGenius

Dear Wincenty Kaminski,

In this issue:

* NetScout's nGenius admin toolset is comprehensive, but slow
  and expensive
* Links related to Network World product reviews
* Featured reader resource

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Today's focus: NetScout's nGenius

By Neal Weinberg

The Reviewmeister is all for any tool that can automate
repetitive network administrative tasks, so we checked out
nGenius by NetScout Systems.

The nGenius suite, which NetScout obtained when it acquired
NextPoint Networks last year, contains Real Time Monitor Plus
1.2, Application Service Level Manager 3.0 and Capacity Planner
3.0. To the NextPoint software, NetScout added a number of
enhancements and additions, including its WebCast technology
for rendering reports using a Web-based newspaper publishing
metaphor.

We found nGenius' network monitoring to be accurate and
comprehensive, the reports thoughtfully designed and the
documentation especially clear and comprehensive. However, we
found the Java-based nGenius software slow and cumbersome. We
would have liked a greater degree of integration among the
nGenius components, and we feel the $150,000 price tag for the
three tools makes the software far too expensive.

Real Time Monitor Plus impressed us with its accurate
monitoring, analyzing and reporting of network traffic. In
particular, its troubleshooting features helped us isolate the
causes of the network problems we gave it to handle.

Real Time Monitor Plus consists of nGenius Server, Traffic
Monitor, Performance Monitor and Packet Analyzer. The nGenius
Server sorts, stores and analyzes packets from NetScout probes,
routers and switches, and it has a user interface for managing
network devices and identifying people authorized to access
nGenius. Traffic Monitor displays real-time network activity at
configurable intervals (from 15 seconds to 15 minutes), while
Performance Monitor and Packet Analyzer examine network
activity to pinpoint bandwidth bottlenecks and categorize the
kinds of traffic causing network problems.

Application Service Level Manager ferrets out application
traffic jams by studying an application's Open Database
Connectivity packets, TCP socket usage or HTML emissions. Once
we defined our test application's minimum service levels in
these terms, Application Service Level Manager alerted us to
service-level exceptions by paging us, sending e-mail and
transmitting SNMP traps.

We used Capacity Planner to discover our network's devices,
collect network utilization data from those devices and report
the results. It gave us useful browser-based reports showing
historical data, baseline data and trends in an easy-to-
understand newspaper-like format. We found customizing the
various Capacity Planner reports via the NewsEditor module to
be straightforward. Similarly, setting up threshold filters to
define exceptions we wanted nGenius to monitor was an easy
task.

The Java and database run-time environment NetScout ships with
the nGenius suite which consists of JRun 3.01, from Allaire
(now part of Macromedia), and an Oracle database, Version
8.0.4.4. JRun is a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application
server.

 The nGenius suite runs on Windows NT, Windows 2000 and
Solaris, and its three-tier architecture makes it possible to
distribute nGenius components across multiple computers.
Unfortunately, even when spread across different computers, the
nGenius server, Traffic Monitor and Capacity Planner components
weren't as responsive in our tests as we would have liked.

Installing the nGenius components takes several steps, with
server reboots required between steps. The tedious installation
is further complicated by the software's exacting platform
requirements. Windows NT, for instance, must be version 4.0
with Service Pack 6a, have Internet Explorer 5.0 with Java
Virtual Machine 5.0.0.3190 and run on at least a dual-processor
750-MHz Intel computer with 1G byte of memory, a 1,024-by-768-
pixel color monitor set for 32,768 colors and 26G bytes of disk
storage.

NGenius excels at monitoring, analyzing and reporting on
network utilization in an enterprise setting. Still, we'll hold
off on recommending nGenius until it gets a bit faster and
carries a smaller price tag.

For the full report, go to
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2001/1008rev2.html

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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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RELATED LINKS

Network management tools for next to nothing
Network World, 07/02/01
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0702specialfocus.html

Aprisma expands Spectrum
Network World, 10/01/01
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/1001apps.html

The archive for Reviews is:
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/index.html
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE

Network World Fusion's Net.Worker site

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Copyright Network World, Inc., 2001

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