WatchTower 3.1 brings command-and-control to large data centers

With the release of WatchTower 3.1 network and systems monitoring company Cittio in San Francisco has taken aim at large organizations. The new version of WatchTower offers data center pros a single pane of glass with which to monitor their entire IP-based infrastructure.

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With the release of 3.1, WatchTower expands to automatically monitor IP-based products from 1,200 vendors. In addition to databases, servers and network devices -- typical components that are monitored across a network -- WatchTower also keeps tabs on technologies in an extended IT infrastructure including IP-based video surveillance systems, point-of-sale systems; wireless access points; and RFID-based devices and equipment.

"WatchTower can discover, monitor and show if there are any performance/availability problems for anything with an IP address, said Jamie Lerner, Cittio's president and CEO. "There is a lot of expensive equipment outside the data center, and if any of it fails, it could be bad news for the business." Hence, the strategy behind offering a centralized monitoring tool that collects data on all components across an IT infrastructure and a single Web-based view accessible to both IT and the business.

Alexander said that his company has numerous devices and currently uses WatchTower to monitor network devices, terminals and firewall systems. Alexander plans to bring the company's surveillance system online in the near future. "We have 20,000 physical devices, so it will take us some time to monitor everything."

The single-pane-of-glass view is very relevant to us. David Alexander, network architectaearospace manufacturing

But Alexander said that time to implement was a major reason that his company chose to migrate from HP OpenView to WatchTower. "After two years of trying to implement OpenView, we had more data in WatchTower after two months," he said. "WatchTower is also cheaper than OpenView, and the company was much more willing to work with us."

Zeroing in on larger data centers
Some of the new features in the 3.1 version that are aimed specifically at the enterprise include a database monitoring add-on module based on centralized, agentless technology; root-cause analysis; automatic network topology discovery and mapping; and integration with eIQnetworks Inc.'s SecureVue and Enterprise Security Analyzer products to enable collaboration among multiple network operation centers.