DENVER - Newcomer Fidelia is targeting the midsize-enterprise market with network and performance management tools that customers say meet their monitoring needs without breaking the bank.
The company this week will introduce NetVigil, which is designed to monitor networks, applications and business transactions. Founded 18 months ago, Fidelia comes from a history of network management freeware dating to the early 1990s. NetVigil grew out of Nocol, a freeware application created by Fidelia's founder, Vikas Aggarwal, who serves as company president and CTO. Aggarwal says Nocol boasts about 5,000 users.
With Net Vigil, Fidelia has extended Nocol's capabilities beyond small LANs to distributed LANs and WANs.
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Richard Beebe, manager of systems and network engineering at Yale University School of Medicine, is beta-testing NetVigil in an attempt to consolidate network management efforts across departments at Yale. He's been using Nocol in conjunction with other freeware management tools such as Big Brother, Rover and MRTG (see www.nwfusion.com, DocFinder: 9853). After years of cobbling together freeware, Beebe says he sees NetVigil as a chance to get the features of a network management framework without paying a hefty fee.
With prices starting at $10,000 and scaling to about $100,000 for a very large deployment, NetVigil's cost is considerably less than the millions of dollars a large company could spend on management software from Computer Associates or IBM Tivoli. Fidelia says NetVigil is ideal for monitoring networks with about 15 to 80 servers. Aggarwal says NetVigil could scale to manage larger networks, although he concedes the software would most likely complement other vendors' products at this point.
"We've looked at [Hewlett-Packard's] OpenView, [Aprisma's] Spectrum and a few others, but none gave us anything that we weren't getting from our free monitors, and they were much less flexible and very expensive," Beebe says. He would like to see NetVigil pinpoint problems faster and provide "easier hooks" into APIs so that he could avoid writing extra software to extract information from certain applications and devices. But "most of the usability features we've asked for, they've added," he says
IT groups within Yale use a number of monitoring tools for network devices and applications, and Beebe says NetVigil will replace the "current stock of monitors . . . and combine both types of monitoring into one package." This will give the groups a consistent management strategy, he says. NetVigil correlates the performance of applications, servers and devices by monitoring metrics such as response time, latency and bandwidth usage.
NetVigil runs on a Solaris or Linux server and once installed, the software discovers network elements to be managed such as Web and application servers, databases and devices. The software comes with an SNMP agent, but Fidelia says NetVigil also will use agents already on the managed device. Each NetVigil monitor pushed out to the managed devices also stores its own database in which it keeps performance data about the device. The company says the local databases reduce the amount of traffic traversing the network.
The software also performs synthetic transactions to spot which piece of a business service is slowing its delivery to an end user. Beebe says NetVigil, even in beta stage, has spotted problems faster than his current methods.
"I can say that twice now we've been debugging a network problem and late into the problem decided to look at NetVigil to see what it could tell us. Both times it pinpointed the exact problem, something that none of our existing monitors was telling us," Beebe says. "Needless to say, we've started looking at it first."
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