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The End All of Network Performance Management: Page 11 of 21

The Argent Guardian 6.0a, $15,000, Argent Software, (860) 674-1700. www.argent.com

NetScout Systems nGenius Performance Manager 1.4



Low-level probe data and its high cost work against NetScout, but nGenius does have some benefits. The product has a superior reporting paradigm, and implementing its proprietary data sources doesn't require any cycles or installation from existing production servers, switches or routers. That's worth something.

And NetScout has high-level performance views covered. A browser-launched Java applet reports performance in an attractively designed newspaper paradigm. Reports are published as articles, and users are subscribed to newsstands that partition data into information. This eye candy does a good job of covering everyone from executives to operations staff to engineers with very little work.

The nGenius probes use a nice trick to track network services, such as DNS and SMTP. A virtual interface is defined, and well-known TCP and UDP ports are statically assigned. Then, when traffic matches those ports, it's mapped to a particular transaction. This release of nGenius cannot use dynamic ports, but NetScout says a future release of nGenius will be able to do so.