Concord Communications

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorUniversity, Master's February 2008

download word file, 2 pages 0.0

Concord Communications www.concord.com Competitive Product Category: MIB and RMON/RMON2 reporting.

Number of Customers: 1,000.

Products: · Network Health: LAN/WAN, Frame Relay, Router/Switch, Server, ATM, Service Level Reports, Traffic Accountant, and Remote Access. Traffic Accountant reports data from RMON2 agents in hubs, routers, switches, and standalone probes.

· Integration Module: Adapter to enable data collection. Ascend (Frame Relay), Cisco WAN Manager (Frame Relay and ATM), Newbridge (Frame Relay), and SPECTRUM (LAN/WAN).

Pricing: · Basic package starts around $20,000. Average transaction is $53,000.

· Network Health console is $10,000. Network Health reporting module is $3,000-$6,000. Integration module is $15,000.

Strengths: · Simplicity of deployment. No need to deploy probes to produce most reports. Almost all reports can be produced by simply collecting data from network devices (hubs, routers, and switches).

· Reports are powerful forms of communications to management, who has the purchasing authority. Concord reports show how the network that supports business-critical applications is operating and when it needs to be upgraded.

· Automated reporting. Produces daily, weekly, and monthly reports.

· Groups nodes by a logical name (e.g., department, region) and reports by the logical name.

· Assigns a dollar amount to the bandwidth usage and produces chargeback reports.

· Plots baseline from the historical rolling average.

· Forecasts trends from the historical patterns.

· Generates exception reports from user-defined thresholds.

· Generates health index reports from user-defined parameters.

· Scalable to collect data from many network elements in a large network.

Weaknesses: · No drill-down or correlated links between reports. Static reports are ineffective in trouble-shooting application performance problems.

· No traffic flow diagram to graphically shows the application traffic paths and end points.

· Concord does not have any response time reports. Traffic Accountant shows RMON2 traffic reports (RMON2 does not support response time). It cannot correlate application traffic and response time.

· Traffic Accountant's ability to break out traffic by application is limited by the RMON2 probe's ability to discover applications and track conversation data.

· Uses Ingres database (UNIX version).

Positioning: · Baseline the network resource usage by implementing automated reporting from network devices. You can't manage what you can't measure. You can't measure what you can't monitor.

· Trending means capacity planning and being proactive.

· Depends on SNMP data source (device MIB, embedded and standalone RMON/RMON2 agents, etc.) · Sells to enterprise NOCs, service providers, and ISPs.

· Announced future plan to package FirstSense's response time monitoring agents and develop response time reports. Announced next release will include Ganymede Pegasus and response time reports. Announced joint development of ART.MIB reports.

NetworkVantage Advantages: · Complementary to Concord. Concord shows the physical (port -level) utilization by polling data from devices. NetworkVantage shows what applications are running and breaks out the traffic load by application. NetworkVantage also shows the network performance by correlating traffic and response time information by application.

· Applications performance trouble-shooting tool. Monitors application traffic patterns, gathers traffic volume and response time statistics, correlates the information, and provides insight into poor performance. Quickly isolates and resolves application performance problems.

· Provides applications visibility into the network. Graphically presents application traffic flows between clients and servers. Displays what applications are running, where, how much network resources they are using, when, who's accessing them, and why.

· Reports network resource usage by application. Justifies infrastructure upgrades.