Like rush-hour motorists tuning in to radio traffic reports to bypass commuter congestion, businesses are looking for new ways to survey the flow of communications over the Web and avoid potential traffic jams.
For enterprises that cannot afford information gridlock, Sprint Corp. is offering a new tool to monitor network performance.
Sprint's Web-based Network Manager allows its ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) customers to plan ways to use their bandwidth more effectively. The service provides 24 performance reports that customers can access daily, weekly or monthly. Identifying network pressure points and traffic lulls, among other data, the reports give companies the ability to allocate bandwidth more efficiently.
The new service responds to growing customer demand, according to Bob Culler, ATM product manager at Sprint, in Dallas. Financial transactions such as check imaging depend on real-time data transmissions and require immediate network access.
"These businesses want to put a stethoscope on the network and listen to the heartbeat at all times," Culler said.
What the reports show
The network manager consists of an analysis probe located at a customer's site and a server that Sprint hosts on its network. Visual Networks Inc. builds both the analysis element and the accompanying software operating in the Sprint server.
The tool collects data about customers' network activity and stores the data on the server, which the customer can view. Together with another feature of Sprint's ATM services, switched virtual circuits, the network manager lets users identify and free up unused network connections.
Although Sprint monitors and troubleshoots its infrastructure, the new tool lets enterprise customers look inside the network simultaneously and see how the activity compares with Sprint's SLAs (service-level agreements). In addition to bandwidth availability, the reports indicate such performance criteria as data delivery rates and delays. When Sprint fails to meet its SLAs, customers get credits.
While some enterprises conduct the full panoply of network performance monitoring and troubleshooting themselves, others may not want to assume the expense and complexity of such extensive in-house operations but prefer to have the data packaged for them.
"The advantage of this service is that if customers want to verify certain SLAs with Sprint, they can see it in color-graphical display," Culler said.
The network management service, which is available now as a complement to Sprint's ATM services, adds about US$12 to the monthly service fee. A more sophisticated version of the network manager is available for Unix workstations for about US$22 a month plus a one-time setup fee.
