The Packet Scoop

We are pleased that our solution is getting traction in the distribution channel. In a challenging economic environment PacketTrap Perspective is demonstrating that its the most cost effective robust solution in its category. Channel partners are a key to our success and we couldn’t be happier that so many are starting to demonstrate the value proposition of our solutions to their customers.

You’ll hear more about these types of relationships as we build our business.

You can read more about our reseller traction here.

Steve

PacketTrap is saving our customers money, and in a down economy nothing is more important than ensuring your company is running efficiently at peak performance. The IT department is always looked upon to tighten budgets and reduce costs. Although PacketTrap is known as the more affordable and robust alternative to overly complex network management systems, here’s a few other ways that we impact the bottom line of our customers.

Management Productivity Gains: Network management software delivers reductions in three of six primary IT functions: installation / configuration, troubleshooting, and user support. Taken together, these three areas account for over 54% of overall IT management time. In the first year after a network management system implementation, it is generally accepted that .9 full time equivalents (FTEs) of the IT staff can be redeployed to focus on other activities. Assuming a $81,000 annual salary per network engineer, saving could approach $72,000 in the first year alone

Reclaim Your Network: Until a network management system is implemented many times it is difficult to receive a granular transparent inspection of the inefficiencies in the network. Perspective provides a detailed view into server capacity and network bandwidth challenges. By freeing space on servers and allocating free bandwidth to more critical applications, Perspective users are eliminating numbers of physical servers and reducing general bandwidth charges. Further, justify IT budgets with Perspective management reports: capacity reports & graphs are perfect to help your management understand the need for new or continued IT investments.

Virtualization Management: Reduce costs by implementing a virtualized environment and use PacketTrap to manage virtual machines and physical hosts. Perspective’s Virtualization Module makes it easy to monitor your virtual environment and ensures everything is running smoothly. It automatically discovers your host ESX servers and associated guest virtual machines and provides insight into key statistics like status, CPU, memory, and interface traffic.

VoIP Management: With VoIP service, you can cancel your traditional phone service through your local telephone company and place all of your telephone calls over your broadband Internet connection. VoIP technology can also save money on long-distance charges. In the past phone systems were not necessarily under the purview of the IT department. VoIP systems are. With extra work now on our plate, Perspective provides a granular inspections of VoIP data as it traverses your network and alerts you immediately when bottlenecks occur to ensure you discover problems before your users do.

Happy savings!
Steve

We recently released PacketTrap NetFlow Analysis, a detailed and robust reporting solution that provides a granular inspection of data as it traverses your network. By leveraging the Cisco NetFlow protocol (supported by multiple vendors), and supporting sFlow® (HP ProCurve) and J-Flow (Juniper), the PacketTrap Traffic Analyzer lets you know the type of data clogging your bandwidth, who is consuming it, and the domains generating the data. By collecting this data you will instantly be able to determine which users and IP addresses you need to keep an eye on, and ensure that applications are not dragging down your network bandwidth.

Advantages of PacketTrap Traffic Analyzer

PacketTrap Traffic Analyzer operates as a first-line defense because it detects abnormal network activity as it occurs. For example, PacketTrap Analyzer will detect when an end user is consuming excessive bandwidth from YouTube, Apple iTunes, and other bandwidth hoggers. With this information in real time, you’ll be able to quickly stop the problem and limit the productivity impact to your users.

Application performance immediately affects productivity and hence the bottom-line. PacketTrap Traffic Analyzer can identify which applications are active on the network and provide usage statistics in the form of charts and graphs on those applications.

How Do I Get The Perspective Network and Traffic Analyzer?

PacketTrap Perspective supports the Network Traffic Analyzer Module (to allow you to capture and analyze NetFlow / sFlow / J-Flow). By installing Perspective you receive a 21-day trial of the Network Traffic Analyzer Module. You can learn more about Perspective here. If you have detailed questions about our Network Traffic Analyzer solutions, please contact us at +1-866-697-8360.

Steve

We have received press in several highly regarded industry rags about Perspective, our recently released network monitoring and alerting solution. See what others are saying about us and Perspective. You can see it here: PacketTrap News

Steve

We are excited that today we announced general availability of our comprehensive network monitoring and alerting solution called PacketTrap Perspective. We are pleased by this milestone in our company’s history and are excited that so many customers joined our early access program. Over 200 customers from around the world installed and tested the softeare and an additional 10,000 played an instrumental part in gathering requirements to ensure we met the demands of the market.

To those customers, thank you! To those of you who are challenged by today’s ever growing and complex networks, who need a solution to manage your infrastructure that doesn’t break the bank and provides a robust set of capabilities, Perspective is for you. You can learn more about Perspective here and also see here the press release that went out this morning!

In today’s environment of shrinking budgets and doing less with more, I am sure that Perspective will help you scale at your pace. Try it for yourself!

Networks are complicated, network management doesn’t have to be.

Steve

Few products can address all network management needs so most IT infrastructures are managed by dozens of disparate point products. What this means for IT departments is a patched-together network that has too many parts to manage, little-to-no integration and support calls to different help desks. And while every network management vendor says its solution is “easy-to-use”, I think we all agree with eWeek’s networking editor Paula Musich when she says, “Vendor solutions are getting too long in the tooth.” In addition to the above, today’s products lack good network visibility, are expensive, and often have steep learning curves.

The Solution

Today’s IT departments need a straightforward, simplistic and comprehensive network monitoring and diagnostic solution that does what it says it does. Following is a list of recommended features and functions when evaluating a network management solution.

Time to Productivity – Takes less than 15 minutes to implement. Quick implementation usually means the network management system should have network discovery feature, as well as switch port mapper, and fast configuration capabilities.

Good visibility – A solution that includes a monitoring dashboard with charts or graphs that display the health of your network at-a-glance. Your solution should also include the ability to easily change your perspective from your network to a remote office network for troubleshooting and remediation purposes.

Integrated – The most efficient and effective way to manage your network is to implement a solution that provides monitoring, diagnostic, troubleshooting, and remediation capabilities. In other words, your solution should enable you to monitor your network, alert you to a problem, diagnose it, and then drill-down further. For example, a solution that has a traffic-flow tool that allows you to find the traffic issue and then integrates other tools that allow you to shut down a port if unauthorized traffic is sucking up resources.

Setting Baselines – IT managers are riddled with “false positive” alerts that take up time and effort. A solution that allows you to set baselines customized to your network is an important way to eliminate the “false positive” issue.

Historical Reporting and Alerts – IT managers constantly need to battle for every dime of their budget so a network management system that includes database features that enable historical reporting allows users to present actual data about the issues relating to the network.

Organizations must look beyond the conventional approaches and toward network management systems that incorporate the best in component technologies. To do less will probably assure being an early casualty of the tremendous changes coming to the network. The best of the most comprehensive offerings are by HP, IBM and CA, but they are also the most expensive and complicated to maintain. AdventNet and PacketTrap provide good alternatives that focus on usability, affordability and incorporation of only the most critical and necessary features.

Steve

In late February, Digital Defense, an Internet security company, found a minor (certainly not “critical”) vulnerability in an early version of pt360. The vulnerability basically allowed someone with intimate knowledge of TFTP servers, to use our software to access privileged directories on target machines. That is, our software wasn’t the problem per se, but that someone could maliciously use our software to access priviledged directories. We patched the software to prevent the improper use about five hours later in conjunction with Digital Defense, and issued a press release. Not one report surfaced of even one malicious use of our software. That was seven months ago. That was the end of the story….until now.

Promisec is a security company that got some PR from IDG for its online encyclopedia. We were included on their list of “top 5 threats” because they had dated/incorrect information from the February incident. Their warning is factually incorrect on too many levels to describe in a blog, however let me mention just a couple.

First, the problem was solved within five hours. This was not noted by Promisec even though this problem was solved months ago. Second, because Promisec didn’t do their homework, they relayed their incorrect information without checking with us or with Digital Defense to substantiate their position to the good people at IDG, who in turn published the article. Shame on IDG for publishing the article without checking facts and double shame on Promisec for their reckless unsubstantiated allegation that our software is a “critical” threat to the Internet as a whole (or was ever a “critical” threat). Now, I am a huge fan of the work of IDG and remain one of their largest advocates. In fact, their rags provide the most in-depth knowledge of our space (network management) in the industry. But lets be clear, only 106 people downloaded the affected software. As of this writing and the Promisec’s article in IDG, only 4 (that’s right – FOUR) of those users had used the software since March. While we’re honored to be mentioned in the same company as Google, MySpace and Skype (the other companies on the “critical” threat list), we’re baffled how our 106 users (err 4 - and we know them all) of that version of our software are anything more than a minor nuisance to themselves, much less a “critical’ threat to the 4.5 billion people on the Internet.

(by the way, for all of you Ethereal / Wireshark users - they also said that WireShark was a threat to the Internet. So, that does put things is Perspective I guess)

We’ve spoken to the editors of IDG News Service, as well as the online editors of PCWorld and InfoWorld (where the article was published). We expect a correction in the next day or so. Digital Defense may also be quoted in the correction, stating that the issue was resolved months ago. I am sure that Promisec does good work, and I surmise that this was just an oversight on their part.

Steve

SMS alerts and email notifications are essential to any network monitoring system. But getting the alerts is only half the solution. That is, getting an SMS alert that your email server is down is worthless unless you can log in from your phone and solve the problem. Why wait until you get home to make sure the salespeople you support can get to their email. That’s where PacketTrap Perspective comes into play. Weather you’re using Apple’s new iPhone or Opera on Blackberry or countless other browsers on mobile devices, you will be able to log into Perspective from anywhere you have a connection and solve problems.

When it’s your day off, enjoy your free time without thinking about your network. Perspective will have you covered.

Get access to a Perspective before the general public. Join our Early Access Program at www.PacketTrap.com/product.

Steve

We are pleased and excited that we are on schedule for the release of Perspective™, our comprehensive and affordable network management solution. We released the solution into Phase 1 of our Early Access Program (EAP) recently, and we expect to start Phase II users soon, with a General Availability release date o early September.

The feedback so far has been strong. Clearly, there is work to do, but we are encouraged by the response and feedback. If you are interested in the Early Access Program, please go to www.PacketTrap.com/product and complete our questionnaire. Early Access Program members receive discounts and, as importantly, get direct access to our Engineering and Product Management teams. That is, early access users become an extension our company. After all, we can’t build great solutions without strong and direct input form our users.

Early positive feedback includes the intuitiveness of the interface, the Load and Go Network Discovery, and Smart Policies that allow users to logically group devices. We’ll continue to update you on this blog.

We’re almost there, and we are excited to have your support!

Steve

I was recently asked to write a blog entry on Age of Innovation, a Tech Web property, about technologies I thought were important in interacting with customers. I couldn’t think of a better one than the telephone. Maybe I’m just old school. Check it out here.

Networks are complicated; Network management doesn’t have to be (and calling your customers doesn’t have to be either).

Steve