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The End All of Network Performance Management: Page 5 of 21

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.