<font size=-1>FIREHUNTER AND OPENVIEW JOIN FORCES </font>

• 03/31/1999

Firehunter And OpenView Join Forces For End-To-End Management For ISPs
Ken Deats, Associate Editor

In an effort to expand end-to-end network monitoring capabilities of ISPs, HP has announced Firehunter 2.0 and Firehunter/PRO 2.0 and added features to each that address the growing trend among ISPs to offer service-level agreements (SLA) to their customers.

In a related announcement, HP OpenView Customer Views now integrates Network Node Manager and Firehunter 2.0.

Fanning The Flames
According to Chuck Darst, HP Firehunter Product Manager, ISPs, in an increasingly competitive market, have to offer to their customers SLAs that may guarantee such things as 100% availability or maximum response times at certain times of the day. Firehunter 2.0 has added SLA monitoring and reporting to its features list. Darst points to several recent Firehunter success stories: SAS airlines using Firehunter to monitor its frequent flier’s Web site and BMW, using Firehunter to provide SLAs for its corporate e-mail.

SLA management features include quick creation by way of pre-defined templates for Web hosting, e-mail and news, dynamic SLA performance monitoring, proactive compliance, and graphical compliance reporting by customer-specific Web access. Firehunter 2.0 also includes:

• A security service model with Radius authentication,
• Management service model with SNMP,
• Full Linux support across all Firehunter products.

“That’s geared at mid-tiered and smaller ISPs,” says Darst.

Opening Firehunter’s View
OpenView Customer Views, according to Piper Aune, product manager for HP’s network management division, lets ISPs monitor services assigned to specific customers and the resources they use. She compares it to performing and maintaining a discovery process across the POP out to the customer’s network connections.

For ISPs, according to Aune, this integration of Firehunter and OpenView will let them see the network in terms of their customers. They can associate customers with the network resources they use, provide fault/impact event management per customer, manage the network by customer or group of customers and provide per interface customer reports.

Aune describes an example of Firehunter detecting packets being dropped on the network, and automatically launching NNM to see what customers are impacted and perform the appropriate corrective action. The integration allows for each product to pass traps and alarms back and forth.