Control over network discovery is good, but not perfect. Configuration is possible via wizard, GUI edit or what came to be our favorite: the command line. As with the other products, we had a hard time using the GUI controls to limit our discovery to just the devices and interfaces we wanted to manage. Because there was no facility to add a seed- or host-device file, tech support suggested we create a batch file by running the discovery command once on each device. This worked well, and because the product has a nice scheduler application, we could automatically kick it off for rediscovery.
The Switch Manager, CA's current Layer 2 display, shows the intersection of VLAN interfaces and modules/ports. For servers that we discovered, the module/port would show the attached devices. Nice! Not all our switches--not even all the Cisco switches--were mapped, but any time a network-management application can accurately show attached neighbors, it's a plus.
Another interesting little utility is the "Path Dr.," which uses SNMP to determine routes between devices at Layer 3 only, creating a graphical map with guesses at segment speeds. It was slower than using trace route and incorrectly returned the speed of the fastest segment traversed as the speed for the entire route.
The Java interface was also slower than most. Occasional internal Jasmine errors displayed when retrieving log files and adding devices to the database after discovery. We were able to continue, however, without any apparent ill effect.
Unicenter Performance Management 3.0, Unicenter Advanced Network Operations 3.0, Computer Associates International, (800) 225-5224, (631) 342-6000. www.ca.com
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