"But limitations are bad," you say. Well, it ain't necessarily so. You may love your Swiss Army knife or your Leatherman, but do you really want to use the same tool to gut a trout and open a bottle of Cabernet? And do you ever actually use those scrawny little scissors that came with that Swiss Army knife? How about the toothpick? (Please don't answer that.)

Wouldn't you rather use a J. Marttiini filet knife to gut the trout and a Brookstone corkscrew to open the Stags Leap?

The "we do it all" approach isn't necessarily best, and smart management vendors know that. They focus on individual tools for individual tasks, and they get the job done right. What's more, they don't cost you an arm and a leg--you can get EtherPeek for $2,500 or SolarWinds Engineer's Edition for $995. Granted, that's no small potatoes, but it's not going to empty your wallet, either--you won't have to spend countless hours presenting the finance department with all sorts of ROI and TCO equations.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying centralized control, with a common schema and virtualized policy, isn't the holy grail of network management--it is--and hindsight makes it easy to criticize the framework vendors. But management on the scale proposed by BMC Software, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Tivoli demands time and money--lots of it.

By zooming in on performance management, Concord Communications, Compuware Corp. and NetScout have proved they can do one thing--gather information from distributed network applications, including data about transactions, flows and packets--very well. And yes, that's just a piece of the management pie, but it's a big piece, and it's not exactly a no-brainer.

Entuity, Singlestep Technologies, Timestock and other newer performance-management vendors will succeed where the more mature vendors have failed because their focus is more finely trained on solving a single problem. Sure, they gather some of the same data, and if you ask them for a road map to world domination they'll scramble to whip one up for you, but they're intent on getting you a quick and obvious return on your investment by actually using the data they collect to help you solve the problem at hand--no professional services necessary. Think filet knife and trout. Corkscrew and wine bottle. Management tool and management problem.

So for now, at least, good network management still means identifying the most critical chores and using the best tool available to accomplish each one--self-contained management applications that don't require professional services is the business model I like best.

Meanwhile, let's hope vendors like CA, HP and Tivoli keep pushing the envelope. Who knows, maybe someday they'll come up with full-scale network management tools that do the trick without breaking the bank.

Bruce Boardman