Itheon iAM:Networks

Formed after a management buy-out from the Heroix Corps in February 2003, Itheon has concentrated on developing automated network management and monitoring solutions. It offers a wide rangeof products under the iAM (Itheon Availability Manager) umbrella that provides the foundation for a number of modules that can monitor everything from servers and storage to application response times for delivering QoS. The iAM:Networks module on review is a combined hardware and software product that adds in-depth traffic analysis and device monitoring to the base components.

Installation is comparatively straightforward. Itheon supplied an HP DL360 1U rack server preconfigured as the iAM site appliance, which provides SNMP device monitoring and alerting. The appliance is remotely administered via a tidy web browser over HTTPS and each component is accessed from a simple tree structure in the left pane. You start by providing details of the network subnets you want monitored and the appliance then runs a discovery routine listing all devices found.

Up to 15 subnets can be managed and after discovery you can set up triggers to monitor devices. You could watch for any SNMP traps from an IP address or monitor for a specific condition using object identifiers. The appliance comes with a range of predefined MIBs (management information bases) but you can also import your own. The MIB browser is used to issue GET commands, walk the tree from a selected point and display tables.

iAM:Servers agents are required for in-depth monitoring of servers and are managed from a separate Enterprise Manager console. On installation these check the server's Registry for installed components such as SQL Server, IIS and Active Directory and provide this information to the console, where each monitored device is displayed in a tree with all available attributes. Where iAM:Servers scores heavily is with its rules as these are used to closely monitor specific components. Schedules determine when rules are active, and if thresholds are breached predefined actions are carried out. Integration with the iAM:Appliance console allows warnings to be posted here and used to issue alerts via email, SMS, pager or SNMP trap.

iAM:Networks requires hardware detector modules to passively monitor switched networks. These have their own internal web server and use keys to encrypt communications with the appliance. Switches need to support port monitoring or spanning, as data must be mirrored to the detector. Once again, we were impressed with the level of information, as the iAM console displays the top 50 applications by name and IANA socket number plus all IP addresses and protocols. There's much more, as you can drill down into each entry and view the top talkers and destinations for each category plus the most-used applications. You can also view graphs and tables of network bandwidth and application utilisation. Naturally, extensive alerting is on the menu as triggers can be used to monitor selected values and issue warnings when these have been breached.

Compared with some network monitoring and management products, the iAM solution is good value. Its modular construction means it can be customised easily to suit just about any network environment.

Author: Dave Mitchell