He thinks it sucks.

No, correction. According to his latest post in Network World, he thinks it “Sucks!!!” With three exclamation points.

What is it with NMS that feels like were are [sic] riding in the back seat from Wisconsin to Florida with our stinky second cousin Bert. Anytime, I sit in a vendor meeting and they are trying to hock their NMS off on me I can picture signs for "See Rock City" or "Wall Drug" for the east coast to west coast survivors.

As a blogger for a company that makes network management software, (well, technically, network performance monitoring and management software), I figured I should respond.

But still, NMS promises are kinda like being chased by a [sic] angry Shih Tzu with your friends watching. With networks becoming more and more application layer driven, we need something with a little more power. For example;

- Flow based management is cool but what if I need more then [sic] just the conversation, I need packet capture/inspection THEN correlate those together with a verifiable SLA? Now what?

- 1GB 10GB 40GB 100GB? How do I monitor that? Not with a plain Jane NIC for sure. Heck at 1GB my NIC buffer size is only 64K which is just fair for 100M. Plus add in fragmentation and CPU interrupts and you can see your accuracy goes down fast. What's that? Your are using jumbo frames also...oh man...

Tough call, but I think you’re probably looking at something like a combo of NetQoS SuperAgent to handle the flow data, and NetQoS Gigastor to do the packet capture/inspection and monitor the large links through storing the data so that problems can be examined for a short time after they’ve happened. On a 100GB link, you’re talking hours rather than days, but still.

Now, this isn’t a pitch, (I don’t trust Shih Tzu dogs,) but seriously, we were wondering about the same problems, and didn’t have a solution until we integrated Gigastor into our suite.

But that’s not really the point, the point, Jimmy Ray. (Do you mind if I call you Jimmy Ray?) The point is partially that what you’re saying about network management software doesn’t jive with the numbers we’ve got on our end.

We use maintenance renewal rates as a way to benchmark customer satisfaction. If customers think our product “sucks,” they’ll typically get someone else that doesn’t “suck.” Last quarter, the renewal rate was north of 90%. This is pretty good considering the fact that the economy is so bad that dogs are beginning to worry about inflation.

More than half of these customers own multiple products as well – no single metric is adequate, as you pointed out, but through a combination of metrics, you can get the data you need.

What I’m trying to say, Jimmy Ray, is not that you’re wrong about saying that Network Management Software sucks. What I’m trying to say is that if we do suck, we’re sucking in such a way that it’s a blind spot for us – we thought we were doing an excellent job.