Admin suite detects human error

CA has updated its Spectrum Network Fault Manager tool

Enterprise IT management firm CA has today released an update to its Spectrum Network Fault Manager tool featuring new capabilities that aim to eliminate human error from network device configuration.

CA said version 8.1 is the first product of its kind to integrate network configuration change awareness with root-cause analysis capabilities.

Carl Lloyd, CA’s senior technology specialist, said that around 80 percent of network faults are caused by misconfigurations. “That’s people pushing the wrong configuration details to a switch or router,” he explained.

“Spectrum will do real-time monitoring of network configuration changes and relate those to problems appearing on the network – so that we can say this problem has been caused by this configuration change,” Lloyd added.

CA said that Spectrum would now integrate with its Wily Introscope application management software, and that version 8.1 integrates further with CA eHealth for Voice “to provide deeper insight into network performance across converged networks”.

Lloyd said that Spectrum is very quick to install, configure and get up and running. “After ‘baselining’ the network, keeping the network map up to date is a key requirement for enterprises and service providers,” he added.

Minimum hardware requirements include a dual-processor Windows server, 4GB of RAM and a Raid disk system.

“Requirements depend on the number of devices the customer would be looking at,” Lloyd said. “In very large networks, we’ll have a distributed deployment of the management system itself onto multiple machines, but smaller companies would get by with just a single server. For instance, over 80 percent of our customers use one server, but most would have systems set up to failover to a backup system.”

Pricing for CA Spectrum 8.1, which is available now, is based on a per-server, rather than per-device model. “How many devices you could manage on a single server would depend on how aggressively you were querying the devices and what data you would be collecting,” said Lloyd.