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Adlex Monitors Network Quality

Posted on: Thursday, 5 August 2004, 06:00 CDT

Company helps customers verify service-level commitments, pinpoint problems.

Adlex this week is expected to unveil gear that monitors IT service levels by collecting user session information and analyzing performance metrics.

The 7-year-old company designed the products, which are part of its new ITvisibility line, to help companies verify servicelevel commitments, detect traffic anomalies such as worms, and pinpoint the locations and scope of network problems.

ITvisibility consists of two hardware devices: one for listening to network traffic.and one for storing and mining the traffic data. The traffic monitor is called a Passive Listening Device and typically sits on the span port of a switch or a load balancer. It collects traffic data as users connect to applications and computes service-level metrics, which it sends to the second Adlex device, called a Report Server.

The Report Server functions like a data warehouse. It stores measurements and network data so companies can run reports and identify trends or anomalies with the help of add-on analytical software modules.

This extra analytic step distinguishes Adlex in a crowded field of vendors that offer service-level management software, says Jeffrey Nudler, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. BMC Software, IBM, HP, Computer Associates and smaller companies such as Ipsum also offer tools for monitoring and analyzing network, system and application performance data.

IT service watchdog

"Adlex looks at the same data the other vendors are looking at, but by slicing and dicing it in a little different way, Adlex extracts a different type of information," Nudler says.

ITvisibility isn't intended to replace other event and fault management tools, but rather can be used in tandem, says Dave Swicker, vice president of marketing at Adlex. For example, in a data center environment, a company could use Adlex to identify a server bottleneck that's causing users to abandon Web transactions, then turn to a device-focused diagnostic tool to drill down and discover the specific part of the device causing problems.

The ITvisibility products are available now. A typical enterprise deployment costs between $100,000 and $150,000, he says.

Adlex is funded by its founders - which include former CrossComm founder Tad Witkowicz and a group of private investors led by Roger Marino, co-founder of EMC. Its customers include financial services companies Allmerica Financial and Prudential Financial, and logistics provider TNT.

More online!

Which new technologies best improve network performance? Which breakthroughs in caching and compression free up WAN capacity? Find out by listening to highlights from Jim Metzler's keynote presentation on effective network management.

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Copyright Network World Inc. Jul 26, 2004

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