Part of the OptiView Management Suite (OMS) 
OMS provides the breadth of visibility and depth of analysis for a complete picture of network and application performance. It’s the only solution that combines proactive monitoring with in-depth “on-the-wire” analysis and portability to see problems up close – anywhere on the network

By combining best of breed solutions for monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting, OMS can be used as a holistic management suite or part of your IT organization’s toolset, to help reduce complexity and improve productivity in your team’s daily workflow.
OptiView Management Appliance and OptiView Reporter
At the core of OMS, the OptiView Management Appliance gives you unmatched visibility into your network because it integrates NMS functions in a purpose-built appliance along with on-the-wire deep packet inspection. When used in combination with OptiView Reporter, network support organizations can create and use customizable web reports for daily operations and monitor long-term trends of network and application performance.

Proactive monitoring and “on the wire” analysis from a dedicated appliance

OptiView Management Appliance is purpose-built to proactively test and monitor network and application performance. Test information is automatically imported into OptiView Reporter for 24x7 monitoring, trending, and event notification, with easy access via customizable web reports.

When used together, this solution provides the tools needed for daily management, and the detailed information and quick visibility that you need to detect and resolve network and application problems smarter and faster. When problems occur locally or at remote sites, the guesswork is eliminated; you know what’s out there, what it’s doing, and how it all interconnects. With a simple click, you can immediately access remote OptiView Appliances for real-time analysis and troubleshooting.

While most NMS can take hours or even days of set up before they are collecting useful data, the OptiView Management Appliance requires only minimal configuration, and can be on the wire and collecting actionable information within minutes.

Daily proactive management

• Monitor key devices and applications for performance, not just availability
• Trend response times and packet loss on key devices and applications
• Easily identify and alarm on the top issues in the network

Web-based reporting

• Provides daily reports to “prove it’s not the network” more easily
• Easy access to information and sharing across groups

“On-the-wire” visibility

• Integrates NMS functions in a purpose- built appliance along with on-the-wire deep packet inspection
• Install at critical points in the network and at remote sites to monitor performance, to observe top conversations, top protocols, who is taking up bandwidth with what applications
• Line-rate Gigabit packet capture for detailed application analysis

Advanced network discovery

Finds devices, networks and problems in seconds.
As soon as the Appliance is connected to the network, it automatically begins to discover devices on the network, monitoring traffic and actively querying hosts. IT staff can immediately see what devices are on the network and where they are connected, by switch, slot and port number. They can investigate and quickly locate “suspect” devices and with minimum effort identify problems associated with device mis-configurations.

The Appliance categorizes devices by type: interconnect (routers, switches, SNMP hubs and access points), servers, printers, SNMP agents, VoIP devices, wireless devices, and other hosts. Additionally, networks are classified by IPv4 and IPv6 Subnets, VLANs, VTP Domains, NetBIOS Domains, IPX Networks, and Wireless Networks together with host membership within each classification. Network devices that may be experiencing problems are also discovered. Examples of problems detected are: duplicate IP addresses, incorrect subnet masks, default router not responding and many more.

Most network analyzers and troubleshooting tools have limited visibility in today’s networks: usually a single broadcast domain or VLAN, but the OptiView Management Appliance can be configured to extend its discovery beyond the broadcast domain or local VLAN boundaries, across your enterprise network, into remote sites and users.

Enterprise network overview - See your entire network from your desk

Using OptiView Reporter to import data from the OptiView Management Appliance, you get an at-a-glance summary of each of your local and remote Appliances and see the network as they see it. How many devices are out there? What kinds of devices are they? What are their names, IP Addresses, MAC Addresses? What problems have been discovered? Who is connecting to your network and when? What is the bandwidth utilization on key LAN or WAN links? The remote hardware agents know, and now you know too.

Detailed device view

• Device types: key devices, servers, routers, switches, printers, Cisco VoIP devices, and others including Wireless LAN controllers and managed wireless access points
• Names: DNS, SNMP, and NetBIOS® machine names
• Addresses: IP addresses and subnet masks, IPv6 addresses, and MAC addresses
• Interfaces: type, speed, state, MTU, slot and port, VLAN ID, and virtual circuit descriptions
• Protocols: IP, and NetBIOS protocol and configuration information
• SNMP information: name, location, contact, and description

Performance monitoring and trending

For network professionals to do more than react to problems, IT departments must employ some level of network monitoring in order to proactively detect issues, rather than waiting for the phone to ring. But unfortunately, many products on the market today sell “availability” as “performance”. While it is essential to track the availability of key devices, it is not sufficient. OptiView Management Appliance gives you two methods for monitoring key performance metrics on your network:

• Network infrastructure interface monitoring via SNMP
• Trending of key device and application performance tests

Network infrastructure interface monitoring Vendor-independent infrastructure device monitoring via SNMP (v1, v2, or v3) gives visibility into switches and routers located anywhere on the enterprise network. With this information, along with user-configured thresholds and notifications (via email, SMS, SNMP trap) you can be more proactive – use OptiView Management Appliance and Reporter to watch for problems automatically, and notify you when they occur. Knowing interface trend data over the long term allows you to optimize network performance, improve efficiency and reduce costs while improving reliability. Select a device and interface to see in/out utilization, broadcasts, collisions, errors, and utilization peaks for the last hour, day, week, month, three months, six months, or one year. Granularity ranges from two minutes to 48 hours (averaged) depending on the selected history interval. Most NMS pollers aggregate data over longer periods; with more granularity in Reporter, you’ll be able to spot bandwidth issues that are glossed over in other products.

Trending of key device and application performance tests
OptiView Management Appliance Key Device tests are used to monitor for availability, performance and packet loss to devices such as servers, switches, routers, hosts, or any other device you choose. They show you the green/ red, up/down status of each device, name and address information, test results, as well as when the last state change occurred. Application tests are used to ensure server and application connectivity by opening specific TCP ports on servers, revealing any issues that may be due to application ports being closed on the path between the server and the Appliance. Application performance is the round trip time for the specified ports as a combination of network latency and server connection set up time (SYN/SYN ACK). Device availability as well as network response time and packet loss are provided through ping tests.

Web-based Automated Reporting
OptiView Reporter greatly reduces manual report generation, asset discovery and management, and network diagramming time and effort. For easy access and collaboration between groups, OptiView Reporter provides a web-accessible summary page with access to every report from the OptiView Management Appliance. These pages create multiple, customizable ‘dashboards’ for viewing critical network and application performance factors. Frequent updates (refresh of data) ensures near-real-time information.

Report types include: inventory/discovery, device and application performance, device and interface availability and performance. Summary views and “Tops” reports to identify the top problems, often used as the “hit list” for the network support group’s daily tasks.

This fast, easy, and accurate documentation can be generated on-demand in Reporter’s user interface, or at a user defined, scheduled interval. Reports can be customized with the user’s contact information, custom header/footer, company logo, and report title. Reports can be saved in a variety of formats such as Adobe® Acrobat, HTML, XML, Microsoft® Excel, Microsoft Word, and comma-separated. OptiView Reporter’s built-in Web Server lets you remotely view archived reports and maps.

On the Wire Traffic Analysis

Traffic analysis at the touch of a button
The OptiView Management Appliance provides real-time statistics for traffic “on the wire” which enables the user to understand how network resources are being used and increase user satisfaction with faster response times for networked applications. Quickly and easily identify top talkers, multicasters and broadcasters or select top conversations to determine which hosts may be over utilizing resource bandwidth. Determine who is using server bandwidth by viewing top conversations to a single host. Analyze protocol mix to identify top protocols being used and also discover unwanted and custom protocols and see which protocols are being used by each host.

Application traffic analysis
Automatically discover all protocols and sub protocols from the MAC layer to the application layer. This enables IT staff to identify applications utilizing link bandwidth including those that use dynamically assigned port numbers to see and validate the impact of applications on bandwidth usage and also identify to use of illicit applications. Perform application analysis in real-time on Gigabit links and determine the specific endpoints (server, host) using that application. Plus, perform a layer 3 or layer 2 trace route to identify the switch or router interface to which the endpoint is connected for each application. Differentiate between specific audio, video, image, and data applications, and show the level of bandwidth usage of each.

Speed up troubleshooting application and network performance issues by automatically validating that network services such as DHCP, DNS and 802.1X are available and operating correctly, ensuring that server and application connectivity is accessible by opening specific TCP IPv4 and IPv6 ports on servers and reporting the round trip time as a combination of network latency and server connection set up time. Ensure WIN servers are operating efficiently by viewing resources including number of users, processor, memory and disk utilization and services and process that are running.

Infrastructure Analysis

Real-time infrastructure device analysis data speeds troubleshooting
Get granular, real-time data into interface utilization and errors via SNMP – essential for troubleshooting persistent problems and determining if excessive traffic and bandwidth utilization is the cause of performance problems.

Application-Centric Protocol Analysis

Full-line rate capture ensures complete analysis Get Gigabit line rate packet capture and filtering to troubleshoot problems where packet level analysis is required and perform advanced troubleshooting when deploying and analyzing applications. Sophisticated capture filters allow collection of more relevant data and limit the amount of traffic to analyze by filtering on individual addresses or conversation, address range for IPV4, IPv4 subnet, IPv6 prefix and protocols. The capture process may be started or stopped through a user defined trigger event – capture the traffic before, after or around an event occurrence without being present. This ensures you capture the event the first time and avoids initiating random traffic captures that may not contain anything of interest.

User accounts

Through the user accounts screen, you can add and modify analyzer security information for each individual analyzer user, which prevents unauthorized use of certain analyzer features for easier compliance with regulatory requirements. Features that can be disabled include packet capture and decode, traffic generation, remote user interface and analyzer configuration.

Context sensitive help

OptiView® IPv6 Analysis Option

The analyzer will discover and display complete IPv6 network and device inventory including routers, switches, wireless AP’s, DHCP6 servers and hosts. It enables you to identify active IPv6 devices in the network and those that may have problems in singlestack IPv6 networks. Router Advertisements are analyzed and the analyzer displays information gathered from routers (by subnet) such as the router name, auto configuration, MTU, preferred lifetime, valid lifetime, network name, subnet, local prefix, on link, and userdefined name.