With the proliferation of networks, federal users are relying heavily on monitoring tools to deliver fast network response and to prevent downtime.
No one single product can monitor everything on a network, and standards have not been fully developed. But today's tools have matured to the point where they may be used together to provide reliable analyses of networks and applications.
"The state of network monitoring has improved dramatically in the last two to three years, particularly the level and quality of information [that] these tools are able to deliver to administrators," said John McConnell, analyst and president of McConnell Associates Inc., Boulder, Colo.
The U.S. Postal Service is a prime example of how agencies have become increasingly dependent on the quality of information provided by network monitoring tools.
"The Postal Service is so large, and we are doing so many different things, that you need network monitoring tools to help you predict the effect of user population changes on the net," said Jim Walters, the network performance manager for USPS' Telecommunications Service in Raleigh, N.C. "You want to see how many users you can put on the wire before it starts failing."
And the agency's need for network monitoring tools will only heighten as USPS realizes its ambitious plans to expand the network from 810 connections at 125 locations to about 25,000 connections at 3,000 to 4,000 locations, Walters said.
USPS depends on Ganymede Software Inc.'s Pegasus product to monitor its local- and wide-area networks 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Pegasus monitors the networks to detect any deterioration in performance, to perform network trend analyses and to generate alerts if there is a problem. In conjunction with Pegasus, the agency uses Ganymede's Chariot product for application testing and simulation.
"These tools work hand in hand," Walters said. "Chariot allows you to stress-test the net. It predicts in real time what effect it would have on my network if I bring on 10 more users. We use Pegasus to generate daily, weekly and monthly reports. It gives me historical and trend information, such as rate of utilization."
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