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APM Rolling Review: ProactiveNet: Page 2 of 3

The ability to create service groupings is powerful, but isn't as flexible as we'd like. For example, the device description field is populated with the location property. All devices with the same description field are grouped under that location property name. Views can't easily combine multiple properties, which would be useful for complex service reporting. Reports also can't be grouped by property; we couldn't group our devices by location, customer name, and criticality.

Once SLAs are configured and relationships established, capacity trend reports can be customized to predict SLA violations. We really like this ability--it's nice to get early warning so you actually have a chance to forestall a problem. Both ProactiveNet server and its agents have native failover capabilities, critical for larger enterprises. ProactiveNet also can forward SNMP traps.

In our environment, ProactiveNet agents were able to detect performance problems within our application that were related to excessive CPU utilization. Agents reported this information back to the console, and we were alerted that our SLA had been violated. These real-time warnings will help prevent critical outages.

ProactiveNet sends alerts by pager or e-mail for problem areas that may impact application performance or violate SLAs. If you don't want to be woken up, you can create automatic triggers with corrective actions for alarms that meet specific criteria. When response time for an application slows, ProactiveNet will seek to determine the cause of the problem. Even better, it will score and group events in real time to identify infrastructure components responsible for application performance degradation.

These relationships can be visualized across application infrastructure components, displaying as many as six attributes in a single graph. These graphs help identify trend variations, abnormalities, and other complex relationships, resulting in faster identification and resolution of performance issues.