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R E V I E W

A MoM with SMARTS

August 5, 2002
By Bruce Boardman

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Smarts InCharge Solutions Suite

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Smarts InCharge Solutions Suite
	Other Products Reviewed
	How We Tested
	Report Card

Only two products--Smarts InCharge Solutions Suite and Aprisma's Spectrum xsight--perform Layer 2 network discovery. The fact that Smarts stores the discovery results in an object-oriented fashion helps give the product a deeper understanding of the network topology and greatly aids its ability to correlate events accurately.

In fact, this discovery method is a big part of the secret to Smarts' success and garnered the product our Editor's Choice award. For a product to understand the significance of an event in any network, a basic level of topology must be known.

Not that InCharge discovered our network perfectly; we had to run the discovery process many times to get the filters right. Furthermore, InCharge's manual configuration process slowed us down. However, the way InCharge handles the process, by breaking down the network into its address ranges and providing many filters for each range, makes the product extremely flexible and accurate. Ultimately, we were impressed with the representation of our BMC Knowledge Module agents, and the correlation between those agents and the SNMP host we had discovered.

Correlation

Codebook correlation, with its unique use of symptom signatures, is Smarts' patented secret sauce. InCharge scans the state of the network, deduces the problems based on the symptoms noted, and gives a percentage of assurance as to the cause.

Smarts InCharge Network Topology

click to enlarge

This technique sounded too good to be true, but when events came pouring in, it worked. Beyond the usual severity color-coding and event de-duplication, we got some clue about what happened to what part of the network and why. When one of our routers' available memory created an event, for example, we could see how often the threshold rose, what devices were affected and the events that ensued. We also found events that indicated high utilization on different ports--an obvious direction to begin looking to fix the problem.

Smarts InCharge lightens the load by simplifying the number of event states a network device or service can have. There are 14 states, to be exact. Among them, hosts can be unresponsive or degraded; applications down, degraded or impacted; and network devices can suffer excessive temperature, backplane overutilization, error rates and instability.

Smarts has work to do in classifying enterprise events and traps into one of these few states, but the vendor is actively providing updates. Besides, we found that most of our events were covered right out of the box.

Getting Around

InCharge's object-oriented design and codebook correlation slowed our understanding of the product. The GUI layout isn't intuitive and would have benefited from context-sensitive help. To its credit, we found a complete definition of all the possible statuses that could fit the fields of any event we didn't understand. Once learned, the interface didn't impede us. The system is fully instrumented at the command line, as were all the products we tested.

Although InCharge has a Web console, it's not a downloadable Java applet and lacks some right-click, context-sensitive and drop-down scrolling menus we'd like.

In our pricing scenarios, Smarts InCharge registered on the low side, at $85,000 for our single-site and $169,000 for our multisite scenario (plus 18 percent of the list price for annual maintenance in both cases). Smarts recommends three days of professional services for the first scenario and five days for the second, at $2,500 per day. Training, at $1,000 per day, should require just a couple of days and would benefit from some hands-on experience between sessions.

Smarts InCharge Solutions Suite, starts at $35,000. System Management Arts (Smarts), (914) 948-6200. www.smarts.com