VitalSuite® addresses end-to-end performance reporting through a number of key product modules, designed to enable flexible monitoring and integration with other management platforms.

The solution components fall into two key categories, Network performance and Application performance which enable overall performance to be demonstrably maintained - empowering system and network management staff with granular, proactive visibility of the performance of the entire infrastructure - end-to-end.

 

End-to-end visibility

VitalSuite® presents enterprise-wide performance information through a user-customisable portal called MyVital.

 

The portal shows user-selected network resources, applications, business transactions and reports on a single 'dashboard' view, empowering system users with direct access to the information that is of greatest importance. A major strength of the VitalSuite® solution is the presentation of top exceptions, such as most highly utilised interfaces or CPU's and worst performing applications against SLA's

The screen-shot (right) illustrates an example of the MyVital portal. The example shown highlights network device, network resource, business application and business transaction information on a single personalised page. Each element on the page serves as a drill-down link to more granular detail to enable detailed analysis of the information presented:

MyVital portal showing the breadth ofcustomisable performance information

Network Monitoring

VitalNet™ is the core of the network performance monitoring solution within VitalSuite. Performance data is collected from SNMP, RMON and Netflow manageable devices and presented through a series of powerful and innovative views and reports to demonstrate threshold alerts, performance reporting against SLA's and capacity planning requirements.

VitalART is a powerful reporting module that compliments VitalNet™ by empowering system users with a reporting tool that is tied directly into the VitalNet™ database schema. A wide range of reporting styles are supported with a choice of font styles, chart types and inclusion of corporate logos. Reports can contain user defined expressions to manipulate data and can be automatically run and distributed to any group of recipients via email, HTML, XML, PDF, or as a spreadsheet.

MibWorks is a powerful utility, included with VitalNet™, that enables the support of any manageable network device within VitalSuite®. Custom collectors can be easily created to enable any MIB variable (however proprietary) to be harvested and reported on by the solution.

VitalEvent® takes network event and alerting to a new level. Typically, management systems will report every single threshold breech with network devices causing the management system to be flooded with events that may not be service affecting and hence are not mission critical. Ultimately this can result in critical events being ignored or simply missed by the operations team. VitalEvent® adopts a refreshing and unique approach to this problem by proactively tuning event thresholds to ensure that only the true performance exceptions are reported to the operations team.

VitalApps™ Application Performance Monitoring

VitalApps® comprises of three key components that enable monitoring of applications at a business transaction level - from the end-user's perspective.

VitalAnalysis is the core of the application performance monitoring solution within VitalSuite®. Performance data proactively collected by the VitalAgent™ software is analysed, collated and presented in clear, easy to interpret reports that empower business managers and IT professionals with key performance information.

The solution enables system users to rapidly drill down through the information presented from a high-level '1000 foot' to granular performance information. This is achieved using patented 'Heat Chart' displays that provide a high-level indication of performance 'hot spots' within the business enabling rapid drill-down access to the granular performance and diagnostic detail (right):

VitalSuite® Heat Chart - indicating

performance 'hot spots'

VitalAgent™ is a powerful, low resource application that can be deployed to workstations in the enterprise to provide end-user experience performance reporting and problem diagnosis. It monitors all mission-critical business applications by performing passive, real-time analysis of each and every transaction traversing the network. All measurements are taken passively from the user’s desktop, where VitalAgent monitors every request across both local and remote links, through switches and virtual private networks (VPNs), to the destination server and back again, offering unprecedented visibility into application performance and availability.

In addition to the end-user workstation agent, there are a number of other versions that facilitate synthetic transaction monitoring, using a robotic version of the agent and server based agents, to monitor mult-tier application architectures.

By feeding performance data to the centralised VitalApps server, VitalAgent delivers both real time alerts and historical overviews that enable the determination of application response times, rapid identification of delays and confirmation of defined service levels.

VitalHelp®, part of VitalApps™, is a powerful, real time solution that enables support teams to proactively identify, diagnose and resolve network and application performance problems before they become service affecting.

By collecting, prioritising, correlating and displaying network and application events reported by desktop agents, VitalHelp® provides a complete diagnosis and recommended solution in real time. Armed with this information, the help desk staff can quickly and easily resolve network and application performance problems with the minimum of disruption.

Key to the power of VitalHelp® is the VitalAgent® technology that is responsible for passively monitoring the business transactions and sending the real time alerts to VitalHelp for analysis and diagnosis.

VitalApps™ is the Application Performance monitoring component of the Vitalsuite® solution.

VitalApps™ provides application and business transaction level performance monitoring, reporting and alerting functionality. The system, once deployed, facilitates application analysis based on performance data collected via a powerful software agent, VitalAgent.

Using patented 'Heat Chart' technology (shown right), VitalApps™ enables rapid drill-down into performance 'hot spots within the organisation.

Breakdown of client, network and server

response time for MS Exchange

Each cell in the Heat Chart may be selected to enable drill down to the detailed performance data for each business transaction. The red 'hot spots' indicate where performance degradation has occurred, allowing the system users to proactively drill down to the device(s), applications, servers and workstations that have breeched the defined service level thresholds.

The VitalNet™ Operations view provides a powerful and intuitive view of historical and up-to-the-minute information about every network resource being monitored within your enterprise.

Information is displayed in a clear and easy to interpret format to enable rapid analysis of network performance with immediate access to granular performance data through drill-down links.

Example of Cisco resources

displayed on the operations view

The following example shows a list of Nortel routers and an associated drill-down graph that illustrates the key performance of the device selected:

Nortel router performance

The Operations view exhibits powerful navigation and filtering options to enable rapid identification and location of resources that meet both naming and performance criteria. This is achieved by selecting locations, groups and resources from the drop-down menus available or through a comprehensive 'Power Search' option.

VitalNet Power Search form

Using patented 'Heat Chart' technology (shown below), VitalNet™ enables rapid drill-down into performance 'hot spots' within the organisation for network device performance.

In the event of a performance threshold or service level breach, the indicators change colour, to highlight the areas in which performance has been affected.

VitalNet High-level View - Heat chart

The red 'hot spots' indicate where performance degradation has occurred, allowing the system users to proactively drill down to the device(s) that have breached the defined service level thresholds. 'The Heat Chart' above illustrates a problem with WAN circuit utilisation. Clicking on the red cell leads to circuits that have breeched SLA parameters.

Clicking in the red WAN cell drills down to a WAN summary report:

WAN Summary report - identifying top exceptions

The report shows the top worst performing WAN circuits for the area of the business selected. This then allows rapid access to the detailed performance data relating to the worst performing circuits identified - in real-time.

The following graph illustrates the up-to-the-minute performance of the WAN circuit investigated:

The 'heat chart' concept allows system users

to locate and analyse specific detailed performance

issues within three-clicks.

Vital ART (Advanced Reporting Toolkit) is a comprehensive Web-based extension to VitalNet™ that extrapolates data from the VitalNet™ database into customised, presentation-quality reports and graphs offering unparalleled reporting flexibility.

Reports may be output in a variety of formats including email, pdf, html, xml or as a spreadsheet.

The tool allows the user to extract data directly from individual fields within the database schema, to manipulate data using expressions and to format the output in any way required. This enables compliance to corporate reporting standards and style sheets and inclusion of corporate logos. By sending the output as html or xml, it is possible to produce reports directly onto a corporate intranet server without any administrative overhead.

Example of Vital ART reports

Vital ART Features

Advanced Graphic Representation
Supports a variety of tabular and graphical chart types.

Report Delivery and Output Options
Provides report delivery and export options such as PDF, Excel, HTML,
XML and e-mail.

Optimum Data Access
Provides access to all datasets, including reference data for Wireless and Navis Core devices within the VitalNet™. VitalNet™ ART will also automatically detect new data being added via new VitalNet™ collectors.

Automated Distribution
Scheduled report execution and delivery facilitates the delivery of critical performance information to those who need it.

Data Manipulation
Report definitions allow multiple sorting and graphics criteria whilst having the ability to use Boolean logic to define display criteria. Custom values can also be derived from user-defined fields.

Customised Report Aesthetics
Customise the look and feel of a report to represent the style of standard corporate documentation, including fonts, colours and logos. Users can also add customised sections to their reports covering any style or type of resource in any format.

VitalNet has the ability to collect network performance information from the MIBs of any manageable network device using the MibWorks tool.

MIBWorks enables the definition of custom MIB collectors to affect the polling and reporting of device performance from any required MIB variables (even proprietary or private MIBs). The tool enables the creation of graphical customised displays to ensure that the raw data collected is processed and presented in a consistent and appropriate way within VitalSuite®.

There are two methods by which additional collectors may be defined for VitalSuite, one is to use the MIBWorks GUI and the other is to use the MIBWorks Software Developers Toolkit (SDK), which is a command-line, script-based method for generating device collectors.

The Windows GUI based version of MIBWorks offers a step-by-step, wizard driven method for the creation of MIB collectors in which data is validated at each stage of the collector definition process.

This diagrame illustrates the GUI driven approach to custom MIB collector definition.

Wizard-driven MIBWorks GUI for custom

device collector definition

MIB variables (leaves) required for collection from network devices can be simply dragged and dropped from the MIB tree to the collector GUI interface.


MIBWorks is a powerful utility that enables the definition of the variables required, the manner in which they are stored in the database and the way that the data is presented within VitalNet™.

TDB Fusion has a wealth of experience in the development of custom MIB collectors for a broad range of network devices and offers the sharing of existing collectors to our customers. This is available to customers who have access to the secure customer resources on this web-site.

VitalNet™ is the network performance monitoring, reporting and capacity planning module of VitalSuite®.

The system efficiently collects network performance information using SNMP, RMON and Netflow data sources using a vast range of standard, customisable and extensible collectors. Data may be collected from literally any network device and using the powerful MIBWorks collector definition module, the system can be used to collect key performance information for devices that use private or proprietary MIBs.

Data is presented in easy to analyse and simple to interpret reports that empower Network Managers and operational engineers with detailed performance information on all elements of network performance and activity.

VitalNet™ WAN Performance Report

VitalNet™ will monitor key SNMP devices within the infrastructure including routers, switches, hubs, servers , firewalls, SAN's, VOIP solutions, wireless devices, PBX's and RMON probes (and any other manageable devices).

The resulting data is presented through a series of standard and custom reports that allow everyone in the IT organisation, from CIOs to network managers, to easily isolate and resolve bottlenecks, verify carrier compliance with established service level agreements (SLA's), and minimise WAN costs while improving overall performance.

VitalNet™ facilitates usage pattern analysis and trending of mission-critical network resources, helping capacity planning teams to make informed business policy decisions regarding the deployment and management of the networking infrastructure.

VitalNet™ provides proactive visibility of devices that are breaching defined performance thresholds, with a range of notification options including automated alerts, SNMP traps to Fault Management platforms and trouble-ticketing.

The system provides comprehensive, granular reporting capabilities that enable circuit utilisation through to top applications and top talkers to be monitored and highlighted for reporting and diagnostic purposes.

The following example shows an up-to-the-minute view of the previous 4-hour period for a Compaq server:

Compaq Server Performance Graph

The following example illustrates network WAN circuit performance over a 1-week period for a specific 384k circuit:

VitalNet WAN Performance Report