Overview

Eye of the Storm (EYE) is network management software that delivers. It delivers on the promise of proactive business resource management with a comprehensive and integrated solution that combines network performance, availability and resource management in one sleek powerful triple advantage of capability.

EYE's fault management distinguishes between network, server and application problems using True Cause Analytics and prioritizes these problems based on business impact.

EYE's performance management provides early warning of degrading performance using an advanced service degradation index that protects users from costly business interruptions.

EYE's resource management builds a comprehensive inventory of network assets, their dependencies, and their physical connectivity. Resource profiles combined with fault and performance data provide an unprecedented ability to manage infrastructure in the context of the business it supports.

With Eye of the Storm
You know what you have and how to optimize resources for sustained levels of service.

You have the information you need to take control and initiate actions to prevent failures.

And, you get the results you need to make a difference and support strategic initiatives.

Eye of the Storm Features

• Unprecedented reporting facility providing summary and detail for executives, managers and technical specialists
• Agent-less discovery of network infrastructures including up to the minute, accurate resource utilization
• Knowledge of hundreds of devices, their key performance metrics, and properties (port, VLAN module, serial number, OS, firmware revision, chassis information, etc.)
• Extensive, real-time monitoring of the entire network
• Powerful analytics that automatically isolate true cause faults and provide early warning of degrading performance to prevent costly service interruptions
• Customizable display and alerts - the right information to the right person in real time

Powerful Analytics Just Make it Simple
Eye of the Storm helps you visualize the potential of each resource compared with its actual utilization. This analysis allows you to redistribute demand to under-utilized resources at will and validates that changes have been successfully implemented.

Eye of the Storm monitors and analyzes metrics to define:

• Congestion: compares the packets sent by the port to those unable to be transmitted
• Application availability: computes the percentage of time an application is available measured at the application, application server, or network level
• Application latency: measures the delay in application response
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): computes the average time between resource failures and is measurable against the application, application server, network, and/or WAN link level
• Mean Time To Repair (MTTR): computes the average time to repair a resource failure and is measurable at the application, application server, network, and/or WAN link level
• Utilization measures: compares utilization against CPU, bandwidth, or line

Ready to Use in Hours
Eye of the Storm is easy to deploy. It adapts to the managed environment with integration through a common API and automates manual tasks, lowering cost of ownership. EYE can be used as a complete, stand-alone network management solution or as an essential complement to an in-place manager of managers. Unlike traditional management applications, EYE is installed, configured, tested, and ready to use in hours.

Triple Advantage
Entuity's Eye of the Storm offers the triple advantage of a comprehensive, integrated availability, performance and fault combined with resource management solution for enterprise networks.

• Entuity improves productivity in the Network Operations Center (NOC) with real-time troubleshooting to isolate root cause problems and performance anomalies most likely to degrade service response
• Entuity enables fast business response to competition, revenue trends, compliance, or regulatory changes while insulating network performance by augmenting static capacity planning rituals with a continuous process for optimizing resource utilization
• Entuity reduces operating costs while improving service quality.

Availability
The Eye of the Storm server component is available for today's popular enterprise class platforms including Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003, Sun™ Solaris™, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, and VMware® ESX Server. Only an Internet browser is required for client access to EYE.

VMware Support Statement

Entuity confirms that we will support customers running Eye of the Storm on supported Operating Systems in a VMware virtual machine environment. Entuity will provide unqualified support for Eye of the Storm running in a VMware virtual environment in an identical manner as with Eye of the Storm running on any other major x86 based systems without initially requiring reproduction of issues on native hardware. Should Entuity suspect that the virtualization layer is the root cause of an incident; the customer will be required to contact the appropriate VMware support provider to resolve the VMware issue. While Entuity products are expected to function properly in a VMware virtual environment, there may be performance implications which can invalidate Entuity's typical sizing and recommendations.

Inventory and Resource Management

An important issue for proper network management is to know the inter-relationships between applications, servers, and the network. By having full visibility into layers 2, 3, and 4, you can quickly identify which applications are dependent on which equipment, allowing you to prioritize issues more effectively.

As with most NOCs the top priority is to keep the most critical applications up and running. EYE shows you the inter-relationships between the network, the servers, and the applications that depend on them. Particularly notable is that EYE's discovery of the physical location of applications is agent-less.

(Click on image to enlarge)
Full layers 2/3/4 visibility - the inter-relationships between apps, servers, and network.

Furthermore, EYE delivers impact analysis information - showing you what needs to be fixed, and helping you decide in what order to fix it.

(Click on image to enlarge)
EYE's impact analysis screen shows what needs to be fixed, and helps prioritize.

Beyond issue resolution and trouble-shooting, EYE provides you a wealth of inventory information.

For example, suppose that your vendor requires a serial number in order to issue an RMA for a faulty piece of equipment that is not local to your facility. That equipment is down, so how would you get the serial number without hopping on a plane to get it? EYE already has the serial number recorded - just find the device and look it up.

(Click on image to enlarge)
EYE's Inventory Report with detailed device information saves hours of tedious work.

The inventory report can also be used to quickly identify which equipment needs to be updated. Suppose you need to meet a mandate to maintain a certain quality of service. This necessitates updating some IOS revisions on some devices on the network. By looking at an EYE report, you can tell every piece of equipment that will be affected. This saves you hours of tedious work.

Here's another use for an EYE's inventory management: suppose, for example, that you need to expand a facility at 375 Park Avenue because your company is moving a new group there. It is assumed that you will need to buy new switches to support them. However, the inventory report shows that you have 67 spare ports you can use. Buying more switches is unnecessary - you've just saved the company some money.

Fault Management

You are a service manager in the network operation center. You receive a phone call from the financial controller from one of your field offices, one week before quarter close, and he says that his system is unacceptably slow. This is typical - the user says that "the network is slow" at a remote site, but you're in the NOC. How can you troubleshoot this? It could be an application or server issue, even though the user thinks it's the network. Once again, the network is "guilty before being proven innocent."

Fortunately, you were already prepared for the call. The EYE Status Summary gives you a dashboard view of the overall health of your network.

(Click on image to enlarge)
Graphic Summary for At-a-Glance Insight

You know it can't be the switch the server is plugged into, because you would have received an alarm from EYE, showing packet corruption on the port the server is plugged into, looking like this:

(Click on image to enlarge)
From a real-time alarm screen - quickly identify what is happening with the device.

You didn't receive an alarm from the server or the application running on the server, so you know it can't be the server or the application causing the problem.

So you need to look at that controller's specific machine to chase down the problem. The Find Tool allows you to do this quickly.

(Click on image to enlarge)
EYE's Web Search quickly locates machines, servers, etc.

Now let's look at this user's traffic and fault patterns.

(Click on image to enlarge)
Real-time and historical fault information can be combined in a single screen.

You check the settings of his switch port, and you see that it is set for Full 100, which is the standard for your organization. However, this user has recently upgraded his network PCMCIA card driver, because of VPN incompatibilities, and that has reset the NIC to auto duplex, causing a negotiation mismatch. There's your problem. You call the local support tech to go to the local workstation and change the setting to Full 100.

Performance Management

Performance management is another important capability of the Entuity network management suite.

Suppose you need to deploy new services, perhaps in support of a new CRM application, to all of your offices. You first may decide to have a quick look at the traditionally popular TopN reports, but EYE gives them to you interactively in a new dashboard display:

Watch Video >>

(Click on image to enlarge)
TopN Summaries per Customer or Business View

Suppose you need to deploy new services, perhaps in support of a new CRM application, to all of your offices. You have been instructed to do so at minimal incremental expense. You suspect that the network is going to be severely impacted by the new application, so your strategy will be to rationalize existing WAN bandwidth.

(Click on image to enlarge)
EYE's Capacity Planning reports indicate where upgrades are required.

(Click on image to enlarge)
With details giving you insight, control, and predictability.

It shows you that you have a link in one office that is need of an upgrade, but at the same time, you have links in two other offices that are underutilized. So you contact your carrier and change the service plan to optimize current levels of service.

Once again, you have proactively addressed your system needs while responding to business requirements.

Green IT & Sustainability Initiatives

Your corporate management have been talking about "greening" the company and IT has looked at reducing power consumption in the data center. Your intuition tells you that there's plenty of opportunity to reduce costs and power consumption of your network infrastructure, but you're hard pressed to find a solution that will quantify the value. Your network has a range of devices that are of varying age, your visibility to server and workstation utilization is limited, and keeping track of how long users are keeping their unmanaged workstations running seems unsolvable.

With the new Green IT Perspective™ module in EYE, you not only have the visibility and data to quantify the infrastructure's contribution, you also have the ability to confidently propose hard dollars savings. A first in the network management industry, the Green IT Perspective helps today’s IT organizations substantiating the business value of the network.

A quick check of the Green IT Perspective dashboard gives you an at-a-glance update to your estimated power consumption and dollar value savings. Potential additional savings are also given, showing you room for improvement.

(Click on image to enlarge)
Key operational statistics and cost-saving reports available from the Green IT Perspective dashboard

In order to reduce power consumption and cooling costs, your company has instituted a policy where users unmanaged workstations will be turned off after hours. With the Shutdown Policy Conformance reports included in the module, you have one-click documentation to how groups or individuals are complying with the policy. These graphical reports help managers visualize and understand the true costs associated with non-compliance and promotes participation.

(Click on image to enlarge)
Bundled reports help monitor results and encourage participation in corporate sustainability policies

Learn more about EYE's industry leading sustainability module here: Download the Green IT Perspective data sheet.

Multi-server - Managing Multiple Customers and Networks

Spread too thin. It doesn't take long before your ever-growing network responsibilities have you feeling just that way. Although geographically distributed customers, offices, or divisions can stretch the bounds of complexity, proactively managing them and keeping all your customers happy does not have to test your nerve. With a full range of graphically concise dashboards including convenient hyperlinks, EYE gives you the tools to easily keep your distributed and complex networks properly provisioned and efficiently performing.

(Click on image to enlarge)
Quickly Assess Multiple Customer Environments Across Your EYE Estate

You start your day by having a quick look at the EYE Server Status dashboard. Here color-coded status indicators and tool-tips give a quick indication to overall performance, availability, and events on all the different customers or networks in your EYE estate. Although network availability for all your customers is at 100%, you notice a few critical events for one network that deserve investigation.

(Click on image to enlarge)
Status Summary Dashboards Display Business Views

To better understand the server in question, you select the hyper-linked server name to launch a more detailed EYE Status Summary. Now you can understand all of the business views for that particular environment to assess and prioritizes your action plan. The critical alerts in the Executive Building are likely to be raising some eyebrows, so it would be a good idea to understand key operating metrics of the devices in that network segment.

(Click on image to enlarge)
Quickly Understand Operating Trends with Device Metric Dashboards

Your eye is drawn quickly to the CPU utilization of one particular switch on the EYE Device Metrics dashboard. There are several reasons why this could be happening and EYE was able to get you to the culprit in short order. Before receiving a customer complaint, you are well on your way to proactively addressing this issue. The new EYE dashboards deliver “at-a-glance” insight to the overall health of your network, saving time, enabling faster event resolution, and improving SLA compliance.