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The End All of Network Performance Management

December 1, 2002
By Bruce Boardman

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Concord Communications eHealth Suite 5.0.2

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	In this article
	Introduction
	ProactiveNet 4.1.2
	Concord Communications eHealth Suite 5.0.2
	Other Products Reviwed
	Executive Summary
	How We Tested
	Report Card

Long the gold standard, eHealth Suite is still one of the best performance management solutions on the market. The number of data sources from which eHealth Suite can draw is huge: network devices, servers, applications, transactions, probes and circuits. The biggest difference between eHealth Suite and ProactiveNet is not the price--though eHealth Suite is more expensive in our pricing scenario--but the extensive implementation and administration eHealth Suite entails. For example, eHealth's root-cause tools require thresholds be set manually, based on the user's data transmissions. Also, we had to apply our network-topology knowledge to determine what devices in the network path could be causing a network slowdown.

Concord pioneered assessing network-performance specifics, and eHealth's reporting is unmatched. The product's Health Reports show more than a happy or sad face for each monitored element. Each report includes various health indices that combine characteristics for each device type. A router health index, for example, includes buffer misses, buffer utilization, CPU and faults. The LAN interface index includes errors, discards and collisions. The higher an index's value, the closer it is to a threshold.

Like ProactiveNet, eHealth Suite requires that you learn how changing thresholds will affect events and reports. eHealth Suite clearly documents what the various thresholds are measuring. All eHealth's thresholds come preset and do not change based on normal usage, as ProactiveNet's intelligent thresholds did.

Concord, along with Compuware, has welded together various products to create very wide selections from which data can be gathered. The company has been at this game so long, it has probably encountered everything you need to have monitored. As such, eHealth Suite gathers data from probes, switches, routers, remote-access devices, frame relay circuits and many more devices. eHealth Suite is better integrated than Compuware's Vantage Suite, so it's easier to deploy server-side and client-side agents. The suite's AdvantagEdge server-monitoring module is a separate product, but the Web-based interface is integrated into eHealth's reporting portal.

The AdvantagEdge module includes the server-side SystemEdge agents, which gather performance metrics via SNMP and rely on both host MIBs and Concord's own extensions. SystemEdge actively checks for services on both local and remote servers and alerts a central server, but even with the Host MIB responding to an SNMP walk, the eHealth Suite server didn't recognize some of our servers under test. Concord had not seen this problem before.

We used the SystemEdge agents to monitor HTTP, POP3, SMTP and other network services. Like ProactiveNet, the agent's performance metrics include name resolution, connection time and total transaction time; the agents also monitored SNMP OIDs (object identifiers), processes, CPU and memory. Crossing a threshold set off an alarm.

eHealth Suite also leverages the Cisco Service Assurance Agent and Cisco NetFlow monitor, which uses Cisco routers to run remote checks for latency and availability. It may not be wise to add processes to a busy router, but if one's hanging around the edge of your network, you can use it get some easy, accurate performance information on network services.

eHealth Suite remains a very solid performer and a good enterprise choice for tracking end-to-end network application performance.

eHealth Suite 5.0.2, starts at $15,000 (typical licenses range from $100,000 to $150,000, depending on infrastructure size), Concord Communications, (888) 832-4340, (508) 460-4646. www.concord.com