Network Monitoring

Business Challenges

The network infrastructure is a rapidly-evolving environment containing hundreds of devices from a wide range of vendors. Each piece of equipment and network protocol must be understood and analyzed in real-time and proactively, in order to identify trends and provide visibility to yours operation, engineers and customers.

Solution Overview

APG is a performance and service level management solution allowing effective management of the overall business performance. APG provides full visibility for multiple network technologies and network devices. The product comes with a complete library of preconfigured reports and key performance indicators certified for network technologies such as MPLS, Cable, QoS, IP-SLA, and Wireless. APG also supports major vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, BlueCoat, Extreme Networks, and Foundry Networks. APG provides access to information in real-time, helping network staff to troubleshoot problems. Historical reporting, combined with baseline and trending analysis, allows organizations to proactively monitor their infrastructure and verify compliance with contracted service levels.

Key Features

Multiple Data Collectors

APG uses lightweight collectors to collect data from various sources including SNMP devices, SSH/Telnet devices, network management systems (NMS), element management systems (EMS), Cisco Netflow and VoIP equipments. Collectors can be scaled and deployed as your business grows.

Hundreds of standard reports

The Watch4Net APG core software comes prepackaged with hundreds of predefined and ready-to-use standards reports to provide your business with real value from day one. Reports are categorized by Inventory, Performance Scorecards, TopN, Situations to Watch, Service Levels and Capacity Planning. Thresholds conditions are aligned with best-practices, and can be easily customized to suit to your infrastructure and service levels. See the list of standard reports available from day one.

Certified devices and technologies

APG understands major vendors and technology to provide report templates, metrics, and built-in analytics dedicated to a specific technology or vendor. Certifications for major vendors and technologies covers: routers, switches, firewall, wireless, load balancers, and wan accelerators.

Real-time, historical and projected visibility

With the Watch4Net Web-based Portal, you gain the real-time information that you need to verify infrastructure operations, stay apprised of problems, and solve bottlenecks before they become critical, all that across the entire IT infrastructure.

  • Network Inventory: device classification by firmware, model, MAC address search, and more
  • Device Health and Performance: collection of charts for a given device over time periods
  • Summary Reports: groups of devices or components
  • Hot Spots: exception and TopN ranking reports to quickly identify stressed resources across a large network
  • Capacity Planning: baselining deviation analysis and forecasting calculations to automatically detect atypical behaviors and alert on potential risks
  • Service Level: check compliance with contracted service levels

Flexible Reporting

APG's pre-configured reports provide comprehensive reporting possibilities for most IT environments. However, there are situations where an administrator might have to define his own set of indicators and reports. APG includes all the necessary tools to customize reports or create new ones from the ground up: a graphical wizard-driven Report Builder and a Formula Editor - that use mathematical and Boolean operators to define custom key performance indicators (KPI). Furthermore, the automatic grouping of resources will help defining reports by using rules and/or regular expressions, which can leverage naming conventions and IT policies.

Secure Web Portal with role/profile access control

Today's security requirements in large organizations require highly sophisticated role based access. APG provides a GUI-based Security Manager to meet those requirements. Roles and profiles can be created to provide restricted access throughout the site, including to: reports, groups of reports or devices, to limit administrative rights to specific users or groups providing the granularity that you need.

Interfaces with major management applications

The APG product can work as a standalone system, or can be integrated with adjacent systems in order to design a complete solution aligned with best-practice process frameworks. Interfaces are available with EMC Smarts, Microsoft SCOM and others, allowing organizations to retrieve and consolidate all relevant performance metrics and events into the APG dashboard.

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