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A MoM with SMARTS: Page 4 of 18


Not that InCharge discovered our network perfectly; we had to run the discovery process many times to get the filters right. Furthermore, InCharge's manual configuration process slowed us down. However, the way InCharge handles the process, by breaking down the network into its address ranges and providing many filters for each range, makes the product extremely flexible and accurate. Ultimately, we were impressed with the representation of our BMC Knowledge Module agents, and the correlation between those agents and the SNMP host we had discovered.

Correlation

Codebook correlation, with its unique use of symptom signatures, is Smarts' patented secret sauce. InCharge scans the state of the network, deduces the problems based on the symptoms noted, and gives a percentage of assurance as to the cause.



Smarts InCharge Network Topology
click to enlarge

This technique sounded too good to be true, but when events came pouring in, it worked. Beyond the usual severity color-coding and event de-duplication, we got some clue about what happened to what part of the network and why. When one of our routers' available memory created an event, for example, we could see how often the threshold rose, what devices were affected and the events that ensued. We also found events that indicated high utilization on different ports--an obvious direction to begin looking to fix the problem.

Smarts InCharge lightens the load by simplifying the number of event states a network device or service can have. There are 14 states, to be exact. Among them, hosts can be unresponsive or degraded; applications down, degraded or impacted; and network devices can suffer excessive temperature, backplane overutilization, error rates and instability.