Pointing A Finger At Network Management Point Products On many occasions, we experienced problems communicating with 3Com hardware from Transcend and required assistance. 3Com was unable to adequately explain or fix this problem and suggested that we reinstall HP OpenView as well as Transcend. Another problem we ran into was a difference between the functions available from within the bitmap views of the hardware. If we launched a device from the HP OpenView map, we were presented with an abbreviated version of management options. If, however, we loaded the device view from within Transcend, we had all of the management options, including thresholds and VLANs. 3Com is moving to fix this particular inconsistency. At the device level, the Alarm Management of Transcend Enterprise Manager offers an advanced alarm threshold setting mechanism for hubs and switches (automatic RMON setting honors went to Bay's OnSite RMON applications). We set up a switch t o monitor traffic for a couple of days. In the end, a rising and falling threshold and associated alarms and traps were automatically logged, based o n the average of that couple of days' monitoring. The only problem we had was a lack of specific documentation outlining the calculations and assumptions that were made in creating that average. However, you could obtain a history that highlights what traffic is like over a given baseline period. We don't find this feature practical if many hubs or switched ports must be set, but it can be helpful in specific situations. Global Views For an enterprisewide view, none of the other products were as usable as Transcend Enterprise Manager. In the suite, two applications stood out: Status View and Network Admin Tools. Although tools from Bay and Cisco offered better high-level views of multiple devices--especially with regard to VLANs--Transcend was more consistent and easier to use. Status View, though displaying only a single device at a time, offers a tabular display that provides quick and thorough information in a concise and logical format. The Link Status display indicated port status, time elapsed at current status and VLAN membership. We found this tabular display easy to navigate when attempting to determine port configuration and status. At the top of the display, we were able to add more switches and hubs, so that moving between displays required only a couple of clicks. All of this information can be output to HTML, which is further enhanced by an index. In addition, Status View creates network utilization reports. The reports are created using a wizard function and are available in the regular flavors of utilization and errors as well as baseline reports. The baseline reports are not as comprehensive as those found in Concord Communications' Network Health or Kaspia Systems' Kaspia Monitoring System, but they do offer Boolean expressions for the baselining of thresholds. Transcend Enterprise Manager schedules the reports to run as Unix cron jobs. A final Status View feature, MAC Watch, helps you track devices if you forgot where they were placed. Besides listing by Media Access Control and IP address, a "likelihood" of where the device is attached also is indicated when multiple references for the address is found. This happens when shared or switched media are cascaded. We found the "likelihood" predictions to be accurate. The Network Admin Tool let us group devices and apply changes to the entire group. Although not as sophisticated as a good software-distribution application that builds groups dynamically, it did let us create groups based on our network management platform subnet map--in this case HP OpenView, but SunSoft's Solstice SunNet Manager and IBM Corp.'s NetView for AIX also are supported. 3Com was the only company that realized that changing all of your Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) community strings is a tedious job, which is best left to a batch process. Traffic School Transcend Enterprise Manager includes LANSentry, an RMON monitoring application. The application offers RMON I and RMON II like proprietary extensions that, according to 3Com, will be swapped out for actual RMON II functionality shortly. Setting up a monitor port and mirroring it to a single port could have been easier. Transcend requires the user to remember and manually enter the MAC address of the network where the probe was plugged in. 3Com says it recognizes that this is an unnecessary hassle and plans to fix it in the next release.

Updated May 12, 1997