Smarts moves on ATM, frame and security

Network management company Smarts will this week launch an ATM and Frame Relay management module, as part of its effort to manage the network at the level of business services with its InCharge products. Other recent additions include InCharge for security, as well as for application services. "This is not a new message," said Darren Prince, technical director, Europe, Middle East and Africa, at Smarts, speaking of the promise that the application services module will provide business-level information. "This kind of thing has been promised for a long while, but unfortunately, this has created pessimism in the market." The products gives root cause analysis of faults on networked applications, determining whether they are caused by network, server or software problems. "We can deploy software that brings together support teams," said Prince. The security management product aggregates alerts from intrusion detection systems, firewalls and other security devices. "We correlate events from different devices, and say whether a particular attack is happening," said Prince. "There may be nothing observable at the point of the attack." As usual, Smarts preened its "codebook correlation", which looks for specific signatures across multiple alert streams -- an approach it says is more intelligent than the rules-based methods of its competitors. Smarts' products share data based on the Common Information Model (CIM), created by standards group, the Distributed Management Taskforce (DMTF), though this is no guarantee it will work with other such products. "CIM is so broad that vendors like Smarts have to take parts of it and make it work," said Prince. Monitoring the whole system by attributes experienced by the user, such as response time, has been promised for a long time by system management companies.

---