Opnet reveals continuous monitoring ambitions

Major upgrade to the firm's application and network monitoring product is announced

Application performance management software specialist Opnet Technologies has revealed plans for a major update designed to provide firms with continuous monitoring of their application and network performance.

Jason Phelps, UK country manager at Opnet, said that the new functionality would be delivered in a major refresh, due before the end of the year, of its ACE networking analytics suite featuring enhanced integration with the company's Panorama application monitoring suite and SLA Commander monitoring suite.

He added that the updated product, which represents version 14 of the suite, also includes enhanced monitoring agents designed to offer continuous monitoring of application and network performance and notify users immediately in the event of problems.

"We have previously used agents to detect faults, but if it is an intermittent fault it can be possible to miss the problem, so we need continuous monitoring," he explained. "Such monitoring allows you to undertake much more proactive management where you are spotting potential faults before they occur. "

Opnet has also extended the suite's functionality so it is less reliant on third party IT management and monitoring tools from vendors such as HP, CA and BMC. "The suite previously sat above these monitoring tools, but the new version will make much greater use of our own monitoring agents," explained Phelps. " This gives us the ability to acquire the information ourselves and not be reliant on third parties. It makes the process simpler as we acquire the data in a format that is optimised for our analytics."

However, Phelps insisted that this move would not sour relations with established vendors of IT monitoring tools. "We have tight relations with all those vendors as they don’t really play in the network space," he insisted. "We are not going to replace CA Concord or OpenView."