Cittio's WatchTower 3.0

Cittio positions its WatchTower 3.0 EMS (enterprise management system) as easier to use and less expensive than high-end tools such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, IBM's Tivoli or CA's Unicenter. However, there's a host of less expensive, similarly functional network-management tools from Castle Rock Computing, GroundWork, Ipswitch, Neon Software and SolarWinds. What sets WatchTower apart is a customizable UI and a unique documentation feature that automatically links to an enormous range of help resources. Customizable dashboards, device grouping and good monitoring management make this package a solid, though pricey, choice for the SME.Most Linux-based EMS products require a functioning OS and a Linux expert. Not WatchTower. Defaults in the install script automatically set up the Linux OS and WatchTower application, Apache Web server and Postgres database in about an hour.

There's nothing unusual about its functionality. Fronted by a customizable Java portal interface with role-based access, WatchTower monitors Layers 2 through 4, collecting SNMP instances and comparing selected interfaces and system resources against statically set performance thresholds. Web sites are monitored using simple synthetic HTTP gets and return codes. These robotic Web page checks provide availability information, but not much performance data. IpMonitor and Ipswitch's WhatsUp Professional perform single URL checks as well. Web site performance measurements from CA and Keynote Systems, by comparison, check each object on a page and walk a series of pages as a user might.

WatchTower's monitoring administration interface provides canned thresholds for monitoring SQL, Exchange, Windows Servers, Cisco routers and CallManager. This enterprise-class feature, which is useful for SLA (service-level agreement) compliance, is common in products from CA, Compuware, Empirix and NetIQ. WatchTower also can be modified to recognize other services, based on TCP or UDP (User Datagram Protocol) port numbers. Best-of-breed products from vendors such as Integrien and ProactiveNet set thresholds dynamically, using statistical algorithms based on network-specific performance. These products' alerts and root cause assertions are more accurate than those with static thresholds.

Added enterprise value comes from WatchTower's customizability. Many products automatically group like devices by IP and service, for example, but WatchTower's administrative interface lets you customize the groupings to suit your needs. Furthermore, the program's flexible Executive Dashboards provide easy access to important metrics for different audiences. Business managers can focus on issues such as availability, while IT might watch CPU, memory and disk use.

Extra Help From Outside

The program's documentation of problems is also unique, thanks to a link to Safari Tech Books Online, a group of technical publishers. This searchable portal provides contextual technical and procedural background from some 3,300 documents from a wide range of vendors. Upon reporting an incident, WatchTower provides links to relevant chapters--even specific paragraphs--that will help solve the problem faster. In our tests, the information WatchTower provided was enough to locate free, useful text online.

Additionally, WatchTower's Document Manager organizes IT practice documents and forms. A checklist for user acceptance of a problem resolution or spare parts inventory can be centrally stored and accessed. Upgrading, changing and customizing the documents or their grouping is done within the portal interface.

WatchTower performed well during our tests, which ran for one month on our Syracuse University production network. We monitored equipment in our Green Bay, Wis., and Syracuse, N.Y., labs. WatchTower discovered our devices using a standard IP address range, and scanned for well-known ports. WatchTower does not support multi-SNMP community strings in the same IP address range. Layer 2 discovery relies on SNMP Bridge MIB, and it had no trouble discovering our Cisco 3500 switches. Cittio says the shipping code will also support Layer 2 on products from Juniper Networks, Extreme Networks, HP and Foundry Networks; the beta version Cittio sent supported Cisco only.We created thresholds for groups of systems and network devices representing applications, and monitored key network devices. We used the resulting alerts to tweak thresholds and to investigate failures. Using the threshold we set for error packets at 0.5 percent of total packets, for example, WatchTower alerted us to at least two NICs that were going bad.

WatchTower's price, which includes upgrades, e-mail and phone support, may be hard to sell to the business side. By comparison, open-source GroundWorks is free, while SolarWinds, which can easily monitor 100 devices, is just one-quarter of WatchTower's price, at $7,500.

Bruce Boardman, NWC executive editor, tests and writes about network and systems management. Write to him at [email protected].