Spun off the Unicenter TNG platform, NetworkIT is a stand-alone suite that focuses specifically on network management and uses TNG guts. This collection of tools addresses all the areas we looked at: inventory, exception and performance, with the latter being the strongest arrow in NetworkIT's quiver.

NetworkIT is very much a collection of separate applications. The data store, polling and event are processes that run under the entire application, providing a shared store of network inventory and state data, but the applications and the GUIs share neither a similarity in design nor a penchant for brevity. We spent more time than we care to admit flipping through open windows and long device lists. Where NetView -- the king of sparse and useful interface design -- would reuse windows, populate device groupings throughout the product and offer drop-down menus of every conceivable view, NetworkIT will have static unlinked views. Yeah, the information and power are there, but they're a pain to get to.

In our tests, NetworkIT's inventory capabilities were less than stellar. The product comes with an object browser that obviates wading through the map to audit network devices. However, even though it does classify devices by type and vendor, most of our devices ended up as unclassified. We're talking Cisco Catalyst switches here, not Joe's all-purpose cheese grater and network interface. We had the same experience when running the full-blown version of Unicenter TNG.

NetworkIT has heavy-duty traditional rules-based exception reporting. The event console is a separate process that displays and collects traps and exceptions; it functions as a single point of reactive management control. Out of the box, the SNMP traps and events from NetworkIT processes are listed. A powerful rules engine is under the hood, making correlation of these notifications into network and systems events possible. The layout of the console has been designed with operators in mind, listing events color-coded by severity, kicking off automated processes with audit trails and displaying in a separate window events that require operator action or attention.

To get all this control, however, you have to build rules -- manually. The rules configuration engine is very flexible, offering Boolean logic, parsing any portion of an event string, and inserting variables for console message and actionable event. However, all rules are brittle, meaning that changes in the environment require new rules. In other words, you can't set a generic rule that applies to all routers and expect it to apply to a newly added router type. This isn't a fault of NetworkIT; rather it's a function of the enterprise traps, which lack a standard format for trap messages. So while this very powerful exception tool bends over backward in terms of flexibility, the management-information set it employs necessitates a high amount of customization and audit work by the network and systems engineers if they want to ensure a consistent deployment of management policy.

Performance reporting, NetworkIT's strong suit, is led off by the RMON Analysis application included in the product. This tool does collect RMON data, and it also collects SNMP MIB II and enterprise MIB information, right out of the box. It has a distributable collection engine to lessen the impact on the centralized server and slower WAN links. The RMON Analysis application provides some very good reports that offer overviews of performance, such as alerts and historical and real-time data collections from SNMP, and RMON statistics on application traffic. Sadly, these are basic canned reports, and the product doesn't allow for the creation of new reports with more specific data-collection parameters -- such as on TopN news or Napster users.

For a more detailed look at performance, NetworkIT includes CA's Performance Management application, which uses CA's proprietary Historical Performance Agent. This HPAgent collects system and network data, correlates it and alarms on it. The management application displays that data in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for trending and performance analysis. By enabling managers to create groups of devices for unified data collection, this application provides very granular control of what is collected from which devices.

Performance trending in NetworkIT is enabled using CA's Neugent technology, and the RMON analysis application includes Neugent technology as well. The Neugents processed collected RMON and SNMP data nightly, then came up with automatic groupings -- such as highest CPU, most alerts or highest throughput collected into like sets -- called Business Process Views. This is an intelligent, useful display of network performance.

NetworkIT 2.0. Available: Now. Computer Associates International, (800) 225-5224; (631) 342-5224; fax (631) 342-5329. www.ca.com