Network Event Management

Today's networks are a complex mix of interdependent devices and applications— and network event management is the glue that keeps them working well together. The ever-increasing volume of information and network devices combined with increases in service level agreements and reductions in operational staff, compounds their complexity and has resulted in one of the biggest challenges in information technology today: effective and proactive network management. The network has become the life-blood of the business, carrying with it the revenue of the company. Without network availability and performance, business will suffer. Automated tools are required to manage the volume of network issues and critical events that occur each day, ensuring maximum network and application availability for mission critical functions. With NerveCenter, the industry's most widely deployed dedicated correlation engine, network event management becomes dramatically easier.

The bane of network managers everywhere are event storms and false positives. An effective network event management system must be able to eliminate event storms and reduce the spate of false alarms using techniques such as topology-based alarm suppression, state-based root cause analysis, and event correlation. NerveCenter delivers all of these, and does so by integrating with your existing management platforms such as HP OpenView Operations/Network Node Manager and Micromuse NetCool. NerveCenter's unique approach to event correlation and root cause analysis, including its "smart polling" capability, gives you tremendous control of how, when and to what level of detail and network node is probed, ensuring that network event management traffic is kept to a minimum regardless of activity on the system.

The benefits of a NerveCenter powered network event management system can be profound. For example, since Gambro Healthcare first deployed NerveCenter in July 2002, the company has realized a 100 percent per day reduction in the number of false positives generated by network events, and rolled out its NerveCenter network event management implementation to over 580 remote sites.

"The high number of false positives we were forced to examine on a daily basis was weakening our ability to detect and isolate true network events," said Dave Dickinson, Network and Systems Management Administrator, Gambro Healthcare. "When we began the process of centralizing our IT management and support facility, we understood the importance of correlating network events, and receiving this information in real time. That's why we chose NerveCenter. It allows us to quickly cut through the noise and deal with just those events that require action."