A little less than two weeks ago, Jimmy Ray Purser at Network World posted that Network Management Software “sucks.”

His latest post suggests that there is network management software that doesn’t suck.  As my homeboy Verdi  would say,

Il Jimmy Ray è mobil, qual piuma al vento. Muta d'accento — e di pensiero.

Actually, that’s not fair to Purser - I’m just on a mission to use apply all the things I learned in school to real life at least once before I die, and it was Rigoletto’s turn to become a literary reference.  Anyway, one of the things we wrote in our response to Jimmy Ray’s first article was that: “No single metric is adequate, as [Purser] pointed out, but through a combination of metrics, you can get the data you need.”

Purser’s new blog talks about Cisco’s NAM – or “NAM 2.”

The NAM 2 was the true star of the show. In NMS, many platforms are closed and open ones are pricey. Not so with the NAM. The NAM is an open platform that will work with many NMS software solutions out there today. It accepts input from multiple sources; WAAS Module, SNMP (RMON,hi-cap SMON,ART, DSMON), NDE, etc. I was amazed at the detail I could pull from my network and display it in many different NMS solutions.

Funny how things turn out sometimes. I was looking for a silver bullet in NMS software and it turns out, it was in hardware all along.

Exactly – the idea is to be able to not just grab data but to grab meaning from it by cross-referencing and baselining.  It’s one of the reasons we’ve chosen to closely integrate our products with Cisco NAM – of course, collecting data directly from devices such as Cisco NAM and WAAS not only reduce the data collection footprint but also help us answer one of the toughest networking questions – troubleshooting and monitoring optimized network connections that break the TCP/IP stream.

And don’t forget about all the value you can pull out of Cisco IOS capabilities like IP SLA, CBQoS and NBAR. We have a pre-recorded Webinar on that subject, actually, which you can find here.

It is only through looking at all the data that one can achieve NetZen.  To be truly one with the NetEbb and NetFlow of the NetUniverse. 

I’m also on a mission to use all the bad puns I’ve ever learned, too.