OpenView Special Interest Group Meeting
Review: 23 October at UKERNA, Didcot
by John Owen
UKERNA, the body which manages the UK Academic Network, generously hosted this meeting of the group. With only one speaker from HP the theme was very much on how third party products could link with OpenView to provide network statistics and traffic information.
Firstly, however, Godfrey Jordan from HP, the UK Marketing Manager for OpenView and therefore a useful person to know, outlined the 'Partner Programme' which makes some 270 third party products available. HP have also been acquiring some companies of late and now have an OpenView Software Division. Godfrey had to cut short his presentation as he had a prior engagement at the same time and many miles away, but we'll be sure to invite him back to future meetings.
Following on from Godfrey, Mike Lucas and Pete Summers from one of HP's Partners, Compuware, described the EcoSystem suite of management tools, designed to ensure high performance in mission critical applications. Within the portfolio are tools to monitor and record the amount and type of network traffic, eg who is accessing the web and where are they going.
Mike Richardson from Manchester University was next up, describing an evaluation of Event Filtering, Correlation and Paging System software for OpenView. (His subtitle was, 'how to make sure you are only called out at 3 am when it is really important!"). Mike looked at four commercial packages to replace their present customised system. All had pros and cons and Mike concluded his ideal solution would be to buy Nerve Centre Pro, Telalert and Alertpage - plus win the lottery to pay for them all!
After an excellent lunch, Graham Duthie of 3Com returned to the theme of traffic monitoring and the Trafix management system. He gave a very telling example from a UK academic site where they had monitored traffic for several days and were able to identify which workstation was generating which type of network traffic at what time. One station it seems was accessing www.playboy.com one lunchtime! I'm not too sure how good a selling point it is but he told us that he had only to go into a site and give a presentation and without selling a single piece of code WWW traffic drops significantly!
Finally, Kevin Hoadley from UKERNA described work he had been doing to monitor traffic to and from the US by academic sites in this country. His data (at http://statto.ukerna.ac.uk/) showed the amount and type of traffic from each institution for each day - all done with a free piece of public domain software known as NeTraMet. Details of how to obtain the software will appear on the web site.
An extremely informative day, even for a non-networker like me, and just as I was beginning to relax with another successful event in the bag my car decided it was time it had a new cam belt. Still, it was 'a very nice' AA man who relayed me back to Birmingham!
