What’s New in Eye of the Storm 2008 SP1

Leading businesses in all industries are employing business service management (BSM) to manage IT from the perspective of the business supporting revenue growth, lower operating costs, and reduced risks. But to address increasing complexity of technology solutions with efficient IT resources requires suitable metrics to gauge the IT value received by business users, a distinctive link between these metrics, their associated business services and infrastructure components, and a programmatic way to automate workflows to achieve cross-IT process integration.

With newly added modules and core product enhancements, Eye of the Storm (EYE) 2008 SP1, delivers IT operations personnel more functionality for insight, control, and predictability of the business asset foundational to BSM initiatives – the network – to achieve their critical BSM initiatives. These latest additions to EYE offer customers a consolidated view of the IT infrastructure, enterprise scalable event correlation, analysis, and automated handling, versatility of metrics for analysis and reporting, and solutions to improve visibility and performance of the protocols and application flows on the network. Even with all this new capability, EYE 2008 SP1 preserves the long recognized ease of use and price/performance advantages that progressive enterprises, managed services providers and system integrators prefer.

Eye of the Storm 2008 SP1 is available for the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003, Sun™ Solaris™, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, and VMWare® ESX Server platforms.

New Product Features

EYE NetFlow Analyzer Module
The EYE NetFlow Analyzer Module provides in-depth visibility into network traffic and its patterns, real-time network behavior and how traffic impacts the network's overall health. With detailed insight to application flows and how they traverse infrastructure connectivity, businesses gain better control and predictability of user activity, capacity planning and traffic engineering, proactive infrastructure and security analysis, and service level reporting for accounting and billing.

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Network Snapshot reports Top Devices and Interfaces

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Graphical reports quickly indicate top applications

Unlike other commercially available applications that are limited to monitoring just a select few protocols, the EYE NetFlow Analyzer Module offers support for the broadest range of flow types including support for NetFlow® V5, V7, V9, sFlow®, IPFIX®, J-Flow®, cflowd®, NBAR® and Netstream®. No other solution offers more insight to help IT administrators answer the who, what, when, where, and how of bandwidth utilization – and enables them to accurately assess, forecast, and address capacity needs. A software only solution, the EYE NetFlow Analyzer Module requires no probes or appliances that are difficult and expensive to deploy and maintain. Detailed application flow metrics enhance the benefits of EYE’s infrastructure topology and connectivity knowledge, historic and real-time performance data, event filtering, and root cause analysis.

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EYE Report Server Module
EYE has been long recognized for the depth and breadth of automatically collected inventory, topology, performance, and event information for operational, forensic, and trending use. The new EYE Report Server Module delivers new flexibility and interactivity for selecting, exploring, analyzing, visualizing, and reporting on any of EYE’s wealth of data to uncover previously unknown trends and patterns and empower strategic business decisions. After all, EYE collects the data, but it is your data. Building upon the openness and accessibility of data provided by EYE’s Data Export functionality, the EYE Report Server uses Web 2.0 drag & drop simplicity to integrate and tailor multiple data sources into descriptive tables, crosstabs, charts, corporate dashboards, or Web mash-ups, to deliver business intelligence throughout the organization. The normalized data in the EYE Report Server can be analyzed and used to generate reports with virtually any third party tool, such as Crystal Reports, SAS, Microsoft Report Server, etc.

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Flexible web-enabled reporting speeds access to critical network operation statistics

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Drag & drop to easily create new graphical reports

The EYE Report Server is a high-performance report server and business intelligence platform designed to enhance data analysis and deliver interactive data visualization. The drag-and-drop UI is fast and easy to use and provides a seamless user-interface for users to conveniently create, manage and distribute reports and analyses within a single graphical environment. Bundled with sample EYE data export databases and jobs, EYE administrators can easily activate a range of sample reports for use as templates.

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EYE Routing Protocols Extension Module
The EYE Routing Protocols Extension Module delivers improved visibility and reduces the management burden of networks using the BGP, EIGRP, and OSPF protocols. With this module, EYE discovers, collects performance data, presents reports, and visualizes active routers and their adjacent peers for each protocol. Proactive management of these devices is enabled through active notification on peer-related events.

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One-click reports catalog routing peers regardless of state

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Protocol filters and color-coded graphics quickly enumerate desired device and state changes

Unlike other commercially available applications that do not distinguish between the routing protocol in use, the EYE Routing Protocols Extension Module offers the details and visibility needed to proactively ensure optimum operation of decentralized networks, including those using multihoming for better redundancy among autonomous systems. The centralized information captured within the EYE CMDB along with the graphical visualization in the EYE Connectivity Viewer help network administrators, architects, and managers to understand the topology of routing protocols to improve service delivery, reduce performance degradations and outages, and eliminate manual trouble shooting processes.

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EYE Integration Module for BMC® Atrium™ CMDB
One of the key enabling technologies for effective BSM is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Unlike a traditional monolithic database, the CMDB offers an intelligent, accurate, pervasive, efficient, and business-aware data repository between business processes, users, and IT infrastructure. The EYE Integration Module for BMC Atrium CMDB contributes EYE’s acclaimed depth of network inventory, performance, operational, and forensic details to the industry-leading BMC Atrium CMDB.

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Integration datasets enable easy selecting and tailoring of federated CI information

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Select CI information from EYE keeps the Atrium CMDB accurate and efficient

Enabling customers to selectively choose from EYE’s rich network infrastructure data store, EYE provides infrastructure details for configured items (CI’s) in federated BMC Atrium CMDB implementations. Desired data attributes are programmatically populated by EYE to ensure accuracy. Included reconciliation rules identify and merge appropriate EYE data into the authoritative production CMDB while federation link rules allow Atrium CMDB users to launch EYE within context of any selected CI for further interrogation. With the unrivaled network infrastructure data programmatically delivered through the EYE Integration Module for BMC Atrium CMDB, IT organizations have a single source and consistent approach to link the network’s contribution to business services.

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EYE Integration Module for BMC® Event Manager
Successfully delivering on BSM initiatives requires a proactive approach built upon automation and event management across varying technologies and business processes. The EYE Integration Module for BMC Event Manager leverages EYE’s demonstrated breadth and depth of detecting and alerting on network infrastructure performance and operational issues to facilitate broader event correlation and proactive incident and problem management through BMC Event Manager (BEM). With the fine-grain event detail provided by EYE, users can leverage the automated corrective actions, integration of diverse technologies, and the interoperability between all BMC service management applications to quickly determine the business impact of any event and find the root cause of any business service outage or disruption.

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Network device operational and performance events detected by EYE

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Forwarded to BMC Event Manager to empower proactive BSM processes

The bi-directional integration allows users to select one or more EYE views to control event forwarding – filtering desired device collections, sub-networks, or individual customer networks for an MSP. All relevant EYE event information and parameters are included to improve correlation. Resiliency and fail-safe provisions in the integration ensure successful event forwarding. With the context-sensitive link embedded in each EYE event, users can directly launch the EYE Component Viewer from within BEM or other integrated BMC service management products in the context of the desired component for detailed interrogation. The result is a consolidated and proactive approach to incident and problem management.

Whether you are a managed service provider, an enterprise, a systems integrator, or a reseller, EYE 2008 gives you insight, control, and predictability of your infrastructure to help you deliver differentiable services quickly and cost effectively in a way that ensures end-user customer satisfaction. EYE helps you achieve operational efficiency, rapid time to value, service level visibility, and control and predictability over the infrastructure foundational to the success of today’s IT initiatives – the network.

Download The EYE 2008 SP1 Content Summary

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