Aprisma Management; Technologies Spectrum 6.0

When Cabletron Systems spun off its Spectrum Management division to create Aprisma Management Technologies, some of us weren't sure if we'd ever see Spectrum again. We were wrong. Spectrum is still alive, and stronger than ever.

Before spinning off Aprisma, Cabletron struggled to get third-party support for its network-management platform and ended up taking on much of the burden itself. Besides the skepticism to be expected when a network-infrastructure hardware company, like Cabletron, espouses heterogeneous peace and love, the add-on modules added on big bucks and lagged in support.

Thankfully, Aprisma has bundled all its device modules with the 6.0 release of Spectrum. This comprehensiveness helped our network inventory; Spectrum accurately identified Cisco Systems Catalyst 5000s and 2900s and older 2500 and 7400 routers. Ports were mapped accurately, and system metrics on CPU and memory were available.

One flaw Spectrum shares with the other management applications we tested -- except Peregrine Systems' InfraTools Network Discovery (IND) -- is the lag time to incorporate data about new devices. For example, our test network included a Cisco 6509 switch with a multiswitch feature card for routing. Only IND sensibly identified the two as connected via a backplane into a single device. Spectrum, on the other hand, listed two separate devices: The router card was identified as a router (but not a Cisco router), and Spectrum called the switch a hub, though Spectrum did identify it correctly as a Cisco device. Part of the application shows the module/port info graphically, but on this device, a number of modules were missing. Aprisma is changing or will have changed its hub categorization of switches by the time you read this and will have added the 6509 to the next release.

A Pleasant Discovery

Spectrum has the best discovery configuration application of the products we tested. In addition to the usual address lists, ranges and filters, Aprisma adds partitioned control of user-defined sections of the network. So not only could we run different discovery schedules on different portions of the network, we could then control which discovered sections we modeled into the managed database. We did run into a problem getting discovered devices to model, and technical support had no answer for us. However, a reboot fixed the problem, which didn't return.

Aprisma has for a long time been proud of Spectrum's ability to fault-shadow downstream events based on the hierarchical placement of a device within a network. For example, when a router goes down, events for its ports and any network segments attached to those ports are suppressed. As a user-settable option, Spectrum will override this filtering of secondary devices when they are important enough, placing a reminder on an operator's console that important devices are downstream.

The events browser displays outstanding events, with filters, sorts, ping, telnet and a nice MIB browser thrown in, and is also context launchable by device so events only for a particular device are displayed.

Sound an Alarm

SpectroRX is a case-based reasoning application meant to correlate alarm resolutions. The concept behind the tool is that as resolutions are documented, SpectroRX logs the environment and performs checks on new cases of trouble, looking for matches. This feature would be a great help to network engineers and would offer a way to hold onto diagnostic memory, a heretofore intangible corporate asset. There was one problem, however: Whenever we ran SpectroRX, all we got were errors. According to Aprisma, this was caused by an install script error and has been fixed in the current shipping version, 6.0.1.

Spectrum also includes an extensive set of canned events, traps and symptoms that are editable via the Event Configuration Editor, or ECEditor. The ECEditor is very flexible, and Spectrum comes with hundreds of configured traps tailored for devices from, among others, 3Com Corp., Nortel Networks' Bay and Synoptics, Cisco Systems, and, of course, Cabletron. One warning: This is a huge set of rules of the type that puts consultants' children through college, so proceed with caution.

Spectrum 6.0's Report Generator (snappy name) is a huge improvement over the reporting applications in previous versions. A full range of report types is supported, including alarm, event, inventory, statistical and status. In addition, a fully functional report writer and scheduler are included. The report application allowed for the creation of statistical reports based on MIB data. The application itself is a full-fledged report writer with a form creator and a report generator as well as a number of canned reports.

We fired off a canned statistics report on a Cisco router that ran fine, showing CPU utilization at sample times as well as one-minute and five-minute averages. The form was set up to indicate utilization on a scale of one to 10. We were alarmed when we saw many of our data points pegging up against the maximum, 10. We checked to find out if the router was having a rough day. When we found that it was running at an average of 11 percent with an occasional peak at 50 percent, we breathed easier. So the report format had the scale wrong, no biggie -- or at least that's what we thought. Instead of making the calculations obvious, they were indexed and hidden, making for a lot of work to figure out and fix. Expect to spend some time learning this drill before you get what you need. Trending analysis is left to the report consumer, but because of the control afforded, it is possible to make period comparisons easily.

Spectrum 6.0. Available: Now. Aprisma Management Technologies, (877) 468-1448; (603) 334-2100. www.aprisma.com