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Cisco offers the unique ability to monitor network traffic by VLAN. Just as we were able to select a single port to mirror traffic to the probe port, we were able to monitor via a list of VLANs. The list is a static mapping provided by a character-based file, but it is easy to change to match whatever VLAN naming convention you might use.

Bay Networks Optivity Enterprise
Bay had the best vision of management, and some very good applications. Unfortunately, the consistency with which that vision and applications were applied fell short of our expectations.

Optivity LAN for managing hubs and switches was the center from which we launched applications. It is a collection of applications that work together. Opt ivity Analysis is the repackaging of the excellent RMON software from Armon, now a Bay Networks company. Also included in the Enterprise package, but not tested, are Optivity Planning and Optivity Internetwork.

World Vision Optivity has at its center the Enterprise Control Console (ECC), which functions as a hierarchical folder. We were able to arrange devices at the top-most layer by our own groupings, while the lower layers of ECC groups them by device type--hub, switch or router, for example. This let us drag and drop devices or groups of devices into new folders or onto applications like alarm status and statistical viewing applications.

Our only problem with this model is that ECC didn't work consistently. The database for ECC was separate but automatically fed from HP OpenView. But for some reason it showed all of the Bay devices acti ve on the OpenView map intermittently. Strangely enough, it did consistently show us all of the Cisco routers listed in OpenView.

One of the flaky but distinctive features launchable from ECC is Network Atlas. We dragged a device out of ECC on to a blank Network Atlas window, and the next-attached addressable node was visible. Along with the regular logical view, a port-level physical view is also available for Bay devices and all third-party routers.

On the Web front, Bay Networks has done a good job of enabling its OmniView reporting package, which displays reports and graphs via a Web server. The Eyenet Reporter, part of the RMON application, provides detail and global looks at network traffic and outputs reports in HTML. Like 3Com, it also can output its reports in HTML.

Light Up My LAN The bitmap view and integration between the VLAN manager holds real promise. The LAN architect comes in two flavors, System and Device, which offer the same layout, but each has multiple VLANs across mul tiple switches that can be displayed from the system view.

We were able to use the device layout over multiple switches, but for some unknown reason, we were abl e to get the system view to work only once. But we liked what we saw. Similar to Cisco Works, Bay uses a file manager paradigm and shows the defined VLANs with the appropriate highlighting of ports on the bitmap device view.

When it came to monitoring network traffic, we had to set port mirroring using the CLI. We found it interesting that the switch would not let us mirror multiple ports to a single probe port unless the probe was on a 100-Mbps port.

We also tested a flexible mapping of switch ports to an RMON probe port. Once the probe was defined, we were able to select any port on the switch and automatically have its traffic monitored to the probe port. One caveat: It only worked on the Centillion product line.

Cabletron Systems SPECTRUM Element Manager
We found Cabletron's offering to be a gr eat element management platform, along the lines of Castle Rock Computing's SNMPc, but it's missing the VLAN switched management integration we saw in the other products we tested. Cabletron positions it VLAN Secure Fast manager as a separate application for the management of VLANs.

We liked the rich functionality that was part of the 32-bit NT application we tested. It included support for Cabletron devices and Cisco Routers. During our testing, it had its share of incorrectly identified devices when autodiscovering the network--not unusual for autodiscovery-based products.

Cabletron's SPECTRUM Element Manager includes an RMON I application that delivers basic functionality. Although not fancy, it includes a quite usable capture and filter application. We tested it on the Cabletron switches as well as the Bay and 3Com probes in our lab.

A feature new to this version of Cabletron's offering is complete Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) integration. We were able to drag and drop statistics directly i nto Microsoft Excel and, in no time, perform some simple analysis and graph our data. Let's see Unix do that.

Bruce Boardman can be reached at bboardman@nwc.com.