Editor Profile - Tim O’Neill is an independent technology consultant. He has over 30 years experience working in the WAN, Analog, ISDN, ATM and LAN test market. Tim has worked with companies like Navtel, Network General, Ganymede and ClearSight Networks and is now helping companies get lab recognition and technology verification. Tim is also the Chief Contributing Editor for LoveMyTool.com, a website designed to help network managers gain access to valuable information and real solution stories from other customers. Tim is a patent holding, published and degreed engineer, who has seen this technology grow from Teletype (current loop) data analysis to today’s 10 Gigabit LAN’s focused on business applications with heavy compliance demands. Tim can be reached at oldcommguy (at) bellsouth (dot) net.
New and Very cool interface for open source tools has arrived!
Adding more ease of management for today’s technologist!
PacketTrap’s first product launch is the PtDashboard. This is part of their new network management solution called PT360, which sets a new standard for network management vendors and open source usage. It is a free download currently.
The PacketTrap Team recognizes the value of open source tools and that today’s managers need easy-to-use consolidated views and that is what PacketTrap is beginning to bring to the industry. There are two versions available, one is free (within the last 2 weeks they have had over 2,000 downloads) and the other is PacketTrap Professional PT360 which will soon be available for purchase.
When the Professional version is ready for launch in Q1 2008 it will build on the features of the free pt360 Tool Suite and includes Cisco configuration, network mapping, syslog functionality, open source integration and more network management tools. It will also include a dynamic Cisco Netflow analyzer, more robust credential storing management, greater ability to save and combine flow results between tools, much deeper network discovery (with network mapping), syslog server capabilities and more open source integration like Wireshark and more.
Both versions' GUI display is like a Cockpit of an airplane – Very Cool, and easy to read and understand – Lots of info!
Their goals are for users to download and use their product then give them feedback as to what is great and what they need to add in the future to address today’s and the future market needs. So download their product and let them know ... finally a company that really wants the industries help to build a very valuable network management tool.
The current PT360 toolsuite includes trace route, TFTP server, DNS audit, SNMP scan, WMI Scan, Port Scan and many other capabilities. In the following, I want to focus on two features that I think really stand out.
First, they figured out a way to let network engineers run any tool, test, report or application from a centralized dashboard called PtDashboard. When I first saw the dashboard, I felt like I was sitting in the cockpit of an airplane. It has dials that tell the network engineer, at a glance, the status of the network. It allows users to create and save project-specific dashboards and return to them later, and gives “ease of use” a whole new meaning by allowing users to view complex network information with one click.
Second, the days of opening up a command line, running ping, traceroute and ns lookup to detect simple network configuration problems are gone. Even the days of opening 3 tools to backup a Cisco router or switch are also gone as the dashboard makes this very easy.
Inline with the company’s goal to make the PtDashboard the only GUI interface a network engineer needs, a lofty goal, they’ve designed it to not only manage the network but they’ve also provided several dashboard gadgets that users can configure to view web content, receive news and other important network information from many sources.
Below is an example of an SNMP scan, very easy to read!
An important feature and quite revolutionary is PacketTrap’s support for open source. The company clearly sees and embraces the technology and its ever growing capabilities. The PacketTrap Team feels that “commercial solutions [should be] compatible with open source implementations” and the company puts its money where its mouth is and the PT360 is just the beginning.
“We did and continue to do extensive interviews with the IT community and the PT360 is the exact solution they have asked us for,” said Steve Goodman, CEO of PacketTrap. “What they asked for is enterprise-wide visibility, single interface and simple solutions instead of complex point-tools … and they have it now.”
I’m always skeptical of startups and their first releases but PacketTrap has gathered a very impressive number of beta customers from some of the leading universities, technologist and financial services companies with over 2,000 downloads in the last few weeks. Check out the comments at their blog site and join in!
For many years I have worked with companies and seen many more struggle to achieve easy to use interfaces and I am big on visualization and ease of use. I feel that the PacketTrap Team has certainly hits a homerun in those areas. I have never been a fan of diving into the technical minutiae – but for this product it wasn’t necessary. What really impressed me about the product is the visibility into the network takes technology out of the picture and makes network management more about prevention, detection and discovery rather than just putting out fires.
The PacketTrap solution is truly a business tool - the underlying technology is sophisticated, but that is transparent to the network engineer. I like easy to use visual technology that makes troubleshooting and learning about one’s network fun (as possible) and easy, I think they have done a great job with much more to come in the future.
I have not tried out every single part of PacketTrap’s solution so I am certainly not an expert. The good news is that it’s a free and easy download – let me know what you think, also let the PacketTrap Team know as they are VERY open to your suggestions and requests. I have several of my technical guru friends running the product so I will have some of our own comments to post soon. So keep watching here or at their blog site.
Finally, please feel free to call the PacketTrap Team as I have found they very receptive to comments and suggestions.
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