Overview

The pressure on network management solutions to perform has never been greater. Real-time business imperatives demand high availability and performance levels throughout the enterprise, all day, and every day even while budgets remain constrained. IT managers using Eye of the Storm can:

be in control, understand what is happening in their network (and why), and communicate the results of their initiatives effectively

Eye of the Storm is the optimum business services management solution:

application aware, automated, and proactive in order to manage network resources effectively.

The Entuity Solution: Eye of the Storm (EYE)

Eye of the Storm (EYE) delivers the proactive solution IT organizations need to support real-time business imperatives. It optimizes the capacity and performance of network resources by:

proactively assessing behavior patterns and interpreting the delta between expected and actual behavior effectively consolidating multi-layered data to differentiate normal network usage from the true cause of an existing problem or an evolving trend that could become a problem delivering robust, complete reporting to help IT organizations actively manage business assurance and effectively communicate their role in meeting real-time business imperative.

Whether used as a stand-alone solution or in conjunction with other network management applications, EYE helps you maximize the ROI for your technology investments and makes infrastructure management easier for your entire technology team.

EYE is One Product Providing Many Solutions

Understaffed, over-committed IT organizations use proactive business resource management to increase effectiveness and productivity at affordable costs in five ways:

• Green IT Initiatives Reducing operations costs and environmental impact is possible with appropriate Green IT monitoring capabilities. From understanding device Power Ratings and Server efficiency to developing corporate Shutdown Policies and an efficient way to monitor progress through a Green Dashboard; EYE is the first network management solution to make the network a responsible Green environment. Read more >>
• Resource Management Over-provisioning leads to costly unused hardware capacity and bandwidth - especially problematic for expensive WAN links. Under-provisioning creates performance bottlenecks and resource failures that divert staff for emergency repairs. You can save money by diverting traffic to unused resources and sidestep bottlenecks that erode customer confidence. Read more >>
• Capacity Planning and Decision Support Simply knowing which resources support which applications enable intelligent capacity planning when required and better decisions. Detailed trend reports with correlated utilization and availability data help to predict future resource requirements. Consolidated scheduled and on-demand reports facilitate regular capacity adjustments versus capacity plans done too far in advance to be useful. Read more >>
• Due Diligence and Audit When taking on the management of an IT infrastructure, confidence in your calculation of the risk involved, and the estimation of the resources required to manage it, is paramount. Read more >>
• SLA Management Proactive business resource management cures SLA blindness so you make - and keep - SLAs without unnecessary cost increases. Eye of the Storm supports ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) recommendations for improved service level management. Read more >>
• Troubleshooting The ability to pinpoint problems sooner and identify root causes faster, helps prevent fire fighting, and helps you focus IT resources more efficiently. Frequently responding to "fires" is costly and negatively impacts credibility. Read more >>

Green IT Initiatives

Network-based Green IT initiatives involve quantifying operational costs and savings opportunities for network devices, servers, and workstations. This information is used to develop corporate Green IT strategies, manage actual program progress, and deliver tangible results through flexible, compelling reports.

Eye of the Storm provides a Green IT Perspective application to help design, implement and track corporate Green IT initiatives. It includes a customizable dashboard and integration area for policies, reports, reference materials, real-time statistics, communities, wikis, and other materials to keep employees knowledgeable and green initiatives on track.

Challenge	Entuity Solution
Identify and develop Green IT plan.	Automatic discovery of IT infrastructure assets including utilization. Accurate inventory data is available to map out devices, servers and workstations to be monitored.
Validate metrics according to Corporate Shutdown policy	IT managers can monitor which departments are complying or ignoring shutdown policies along with their associated costs through real-time dashboard alerts or reports.
Rank power consumption per device for energy efficiency savings potential.	EYE proactively ranks network devices based on energy consumption, making it possible to highlight older devices with poor energy efficiency ratings to be put on a replacement schedule.
Gain visibility into server capacity levels that support critical business services.	Identifies operating characteristics of servers , providing insight into inefficiencies for better application deployment, resource allocation, etc.

Network Resource Management

Eye of the Storm performs availability, resource and performance network management but it is the combination of inventory and performance information that allows Eye of the Storm to readily identify the mission-critical issue of asset performance.

With shrinking budgets topping the list of managers' concerns, squeezing greater returns out of current IT assets can help to both forestall capital expenditure and deliver improved service levels. Many enterprises limit their return on infrastructure investment by NOT having a:

• Comprehensive view of their assets and utilization,
• Comprehensive view of the impact of Capital and Operational expenditure on infrastructure performance, or
• Predictable response to downtime and performance degradation.
  
  
  

Challenge	Entuity Solution
Know your inventory.	Automatic discovery of IT infrastructure assets. Real-time access to inventory and performance data.
Know where the problems are occurring and their cause.	End-to-end visibility of IT infrastructure, and Entuity's root cause analysis based on vector differencing allows identification of the true cause of performance degradation.
View the current state of the infrastructure.	Topology information presented through a 3D interface allows easy visualization of device, application server and application relationships.
Understand the short, medium and long terms trends on your infrastructure.	In real-time graph any attribute asset. Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reports provide high level summaries of trends, run Capacity Planning reports for more detailed analysis.

Capacity Planning

Capacity Planning involves the identification of trends in resource usage, and using that information to plan for the projected changes in resource demand, essential for successful network management.

Eye of the Storm uses a series of indicators and provides a full set of reports to assist in capacity planning. These reports range from high-level management summaries that indicate the infrastructure trends down to device and interface level detail.

An important aspect of Eye of the Storm capacity planning is the view concept, which allows you to look at the infrastructure in ways that reflect your business, e.g. by office, by department, by geography.

Challenge	Entuity Solution
Identify the demand for network assets	Always accurate and up-to-date volume data, with TopN reports identifying over and under utilized assets
Validate changes were successfully implemented according to specification	Topology map data available for export, on demand reports provide real-time performance information
Communicate capacity planning information to IT user, IT Manager and CIO	Reports aimed at providing a level of detail appropriate to the business question
Gain visibility into rapidly changing infrastructure that supports critical business services	Capacity Planning reports include detailed breakdown of asset performance, utilization, trending, where the change are occurring

Due Diligence and Audit

When taking on the management of an IT infrastructure, confidence in your calculation of the risk involved, and the estimation of the resources required to manage it, is paramount. Whether you are an Enterprise, Outsourcer or Service Provider often your access to the infrastructure is limited, and the time your client/potential client wants to invest in your investigation even more so.

This is where Eye of the Storm can make a difference, it's easy to install and configure, collects and reports on the information you require and impact to the client and their infrastructure is minimal.

Challenge	Entuity Solution
Minimum impact to the client, minimum impact on their infrastructure, but still get the required the information.	Easy on site configuration in one half day. Optimized polling of assets. End-to-end visibility of the IT infrastructure, management of availability, resource and performance data.
Limited time to collect information.	Automatic discovery of infrastructure. Immediate gathering of asset performance metrics, no need to wait for the building of baselines; Eye of the Storm knows the capabilities of each asset and its performance.
Discover the underlying state of the infrastructure, know about which assets are under-utilized and which are over-utilized.	Automatically collected inventory reports details of "sweated assets" and where there is spare capacity within the infrastructure.
Investigate and analyze the IT infrastructure after collecting data.	Eye of the Storm offers full functionality when removed from the monitored site, allowing running of reports, graphing of attributes, building of new Views, viewing of full event histories.

Eye of the Storm for Service Level Management

Overview

Eye of the Storm® (EYE) is a highly flexible IT infrastructure management solution. This paper summarizes its application as a Service Level Management tool, including management of Service Level Agreements (SLA).

What is Service Level Management?
SLAs define the quality of service that the consumer of the service expects to receive and the provider of the service expects to deliver. Providers may be an internal IT group providing infrastructure services to business units within an enterprise, or an ISP for example.

Whether you are the provider or consumer, identifying and measuring network access and service delivery is the only way of assuring the quality of that delivery. Eye of the Storm service level management supports both the formal approach of SLAs and a range of other metrics and reports that support a more informal approach to managing service delivery.

Eye of the Storm allows you to set different SLAs for different areas of the managed infrastructure, for different customers, technologies and applications. Designed for easy to control SLA management, with comprehensive and readily understandable SLA reports, Eye of the Storm allows all involved to agree on service delivery.

Easy to Implement Service Level Management
Eye of the Storm implements SLAs as part of the wider integrated infrastructure management solution. SLAs are set against Business Views, allowing both high level and fine detail control.

Service levels can be set against a full range of metrics including:

• Faults, raised against managed infrastructure objects, for example applications, application servers and devices.
• Congestion, the ratio of packets sent by the port to those unable to be transmitted.
• Application Availability, percentage of time the application is available. This can be measured at the application, application server and network levels.
• Application Latency, the delay in application response.
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), average time between asset failure, measurable against application, application server, network and WAN link levels.
• Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), average time to repair asset failure, measurable at application, application server, network and WAN link levels.
• Utilization measures, for example set against CPU, bandwidth and line. The range of service level indicators allows a broader, more business aware definition of service delivery. MTTR and MTBF are especially important when measuring how service delivery impacts a business.

Eye of the Storm functionality for Service Level Management

Bulletin Board shows source and impact of infrastructure events

Real-time graphing of service delivery against SLAs

Day-to-Day Service Level Management
Eye of the Storm’s performance capabilities allow raising of events that indicate where problems on the infrastructure are likely to occur. Proactive management of the infrastructure prevents performance degradation from making services unavailable and impacting SLAs.

Highly configurable event and service level thresholds allow you to tailor Eye of the Storm to reflect agreed service levels. Early notification of problems that could lead to the violation of those agreements is crucial. Eye of the Storm allows you to set the method of notification that best suits you. For example:

• Event Manager can be configured with color coding, audio alarms, annotations. These can be set for an event type, for a particular network asset or a combination of the two.
• Asset Navigator can display the topology of the critical paths, displaying in real time state changes and identifying the true cause of each change.
• Notification integration allows you to forward key events by e-mail and text messaging.
• Integration solutions allow forwarding of alarms to leading Manager of Managers solutions.
• Eye of the Storm allows you to graph both SLA levels and actual performance, useful for analyzing SLA performance.

Example SLA Application Availability Interactive Query

Transparent Service Level Management
Successful Service Level Management requires not only delivery of service that satisfies both provider and consumer, but also proof of that delivery. It is here Eye of the Storm's report suite delivers:

• Executive overviews through the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reports. Service delivery is identified using a selected metric, e.g. CPU Utilization. Reports include trending and TopN sections, ideal for medium and long term planning.
• IT Management overviews provide high level breakdowns of service delivery. For example, Availability Summary reports on application, application server, network and WAN link service delivery.
• Interactive Queries provide a metric-by-metric breakdown of service delivery. Together with a TopN assets and drill-down facility they are an ideal basis for investigating service delivery.
• Consumer access to service management reports through pdf distribution, extranet interface and XML interfaces.
• Custom report functionality that allows the building of Flex Reports and custom interfaces through the EYE COM API to your particular requirements.

Component Viewer clearly displays in depth inventory data

Eye of the Storm IP SLA Performance
Eye of the Storm's IP SLA Performance module provides infrastructure monitoring from layer 3 and above. This module implements Cisco's IOS IP SLA - formerly known as Cisco Service Assurance Agent (SAA), allowing you to leverage your current investment in Cisco devices and the Cisco IOS®.

IP SLA's per-class traffic monitoring allows easy application of metrics to key SLAs. For example, UDP jitter probes measure one way latency, round-trip latency, jitter and packet loss. These are all useful when monitoring infrastructure circuit quality and behavior, for example on VoIP.

Eye of the Storm implements SAA probes by:

• Identifying links between devices through IP Pairing.
• Identifying the probes each device can support.
• Defaulting sensible probe configuration values.
• Creating probes with a limited life span (450 seconds), so probes expire rather than Eye of the Storm having to delete them.

Within Eye of the Storm these paired links can be grouped together to form end-to-end paths (EEPs). EEPs can be created to monitor both client-server and infrastructure performance. Eye of the Storm currently supports these IP SLA probe types:

• DHCP _ TCP Connect
• DNS _ UDP Echo
• HTTP _ UDP Jitter
• ICMP Echo

IP SLA information can be viewed through Component Viewer and graphed using Attribute Grapher. IP SLA information is also available through Flex Reports.

EYE's IP SLA Modules supports popular performance probes

Example IP SLA implementation showing SAA enabled routers and switches. Only probes are created on the devices, IP Pairings and EEPs only exist with EYE.

Eye of the Storm Summary
Eye of the Storm combines IT performance, fault and inventory management into one powerful IT network management solution. Its integrated database aligns business applications with IT infrastructure and provides the historical context required to detect, isolate and report performance and service degradations in real time. The highly flexible reporting engine supports both ad hoc data queries and scheduled reports.

EYE users find its ease of deployment, ease of use, and immediate ROI key differentiates. Entuity’s customers are some of the largest companies in the world with the most complex networks imaginable. They include: Banc of America Securities, Credit Suisse First Boston, IBM Global Services, JP Morgan, Lloyds TSB, Nomura, MetLife, O2, Universal Studios, University of Minnesota, Magellan Health Services, Cooperative Financial Services, United States National Guard and California State University.

Eye of the Storm Integrated Network Management
The convergence of different types of information allows Eye of the Storm a unique understanding of network events, changes in network usage and their impact on your business:

• Performance Management uses Service Degradation Sensitivity to predict problems, so infrastructure managers can take action before users notice.
• Fault Management distinguishes between network, server and application faults and then reports the True Cause along with its business implications.
• Inventory Management provides a full inventory of IT infrastructure assets and what they are connected to. Included is a Spare Ports Report that can save you more than the cost of the Entuity solution in a single session.

Download Brief in PDF Format >>

Troubleshooting the IT Infrastructure

Infrastructure management is often about preventing small problems from developing into large ones. Eye of the Storm is a proactive infrastructure management tool, able to identify, for example, where performance degradation is occurring, where trends in network usage will require changes in your infrastructure, in effect where problems will occur.

When problems arise Eye of the Storm identifies the true cause:

• No deductive analysis, the root cause is known.
• No signature symptom comparison, the root cause is known.
• No downstream suppression, only one root cause event raised.

Events are presented through an easy to use Event Manager, although they can be easily routed to a Manager of Managers, or indeed Eye of the Storm can accept events from third party software.

Challenge	Entuity Solution
Identify why performance degrades and prevent outages.	TopN utilization reports identify, for example, the highest/lowest utilized assets, biggest changes, highest events raised against.
Assure infrastructure service delivery.	Proactive Event Manager identifies where problems will occur before they do.
Find the root cause of a problem.	End-to-end visibility allows Eye of the Storm to identify the true cause of a problem and only raise an event for that cause.
Integration with Manager of Managers.	A number of certified integration solutions with leading vendors, and more generic trap forwarding solutions are available.