Offering User Defined Polling, RESTful API, Enhanced Event Management and Support for Cisco UCS and Amazon AWS

Entuity announced Entuity 15.5, another semi-annual major release of its software.

Entuity 15.5 adds several new features that boost automation and give customers even greater flexibility in tailoring their network monitoring requirements to support business objectives.

Some highlights include:

- User-Defined Polling — enables customers to extend Entuity’s already powerful data collection system according to their needs, allowing for maximum flexibility over their monitoring environment. All polled data is visible through the Entuity web UI and available for reporting and event/incident generation. Unlike lower end tools, Entuity’s user defined polling doesn’t focus on increasing scalability by increasing polling intervals. Rather, enterprise-class user defined polling helps customize and augment attributes being polled. For example, user defined polling adds flexibility and extends the custom methods used to obtain information from proprietary SNMP MIBs of devices that may not yet be fully handled right out of the box. This is particularly useful for refining the monitoring of such things as fans, power supplies and memory pools.

According to John Diamond, Entuity Principal Solutions Architect, “There are several practical applications that our users have told us about, in addition to providing a standard way to add extra statistical gathering to the already wide range of standard metrics being polled. For example, Entuity users can add compression efficiency monitoring for a WAN data compression device or extend the modeling capabilities beyond the modeling dimensions already included in the product. User defined polling could also allow, for instance, multicast groups to be uniquely discovered and monitored where devices are configured for multicast operation.”

- RESTful API — enables customers to automate and easily link workflow systems with their network monitoring system. Entuity’s RESTful API delivers a modern approach to performing administrative tasks either for a single server or across multi-server environments. This can be useful for organizations with large networks looking to automate regular maintenance tasks in the NOC, or for MSPs needing to automate operations such as taking a new customer and their devices under management. Entuity uses the concept of views to divide up and containerize different parts of the monitored network and the building and maintenance of views can now be achieved through the RESTful API, which provides greater agility to meet fast-changing business needs.

- Enhanced Event Management System (EMS) Trap Handling — The EMS SNMP Trap Handling function has been enhanced to allow incident/event integration directly from the EMS to third-party products, such as Dell Foglight, IBM Tivoli and NetCool, HP Software, and other frameworks. It should be noted that Entuity’s trap handling function allows higher order filtered incidents to be forwarded to these systems, rather than storms of raw events. This greatly reduces the information processing and resolution time for the users of those frameworks, thereby allowing for better use of IT staff and improving network availability and performance.

- Reporting — New reports have been added to the already extensive reporting capabilities of Entuity to make it easier for users to identify threshold values throughout the system. This is particularly useful for network administrators who may typically have thousands of threshold values to manage. Thresholds can now be adjusted through the Entuity UI while allowing administrators to easily maintain visibility and documentation into which settings have been changed, what the new values are and what the default values were before the change.

- Amazon Web Services (AWS) Support – This powerful new feature is the equivalent of adding ‘public cloud’ management to a previously ‘private cloud’ or on-premises infrastructure management only product. Entuity now discovers the AWS virtual computing platform and represents it in the Entuity UI alongside on-premises equipment.

- Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Enhancements – enables UCS components to be discovered and monitored in real-time through one point of entry: the UCS Manager which is an intrinsic part of every UCS deployment. This release includes support for UCS Manager 1.4 onwards running on 6100/6200 series fabric interconnects and also supports UCS B-series & C-series. All information represented in the Entuity UI and can be represented in reports, dashboards, and used for ad hoc analysis.

- Technology and Administrative Enhancements—several additional enhancements have been made in Entuity 15.5 to make setup and oversight easier for the Entuity administrator.

According to Michael Jannery, Entuity President and CEO, “Entuity 15.5 is a continuation of our commitment to provide our customers with two major product releases per year. The network management landscape changes quickly and we believe we owe it to our customers to respond to changes just as quickly. We challenge any other enterprise class network management solution to keep up with us.”

Entuity 15.5 general availability is expected in late June.