1. Link to website: http://www.opnet.com/solutions/application_performance/panorama.html
2. White paper downloaded from that site: "Understanding OPNET Panorama’s Performance Analysis Engines"
General comment: OPNET becomes the next generation tool provider that has “learning behavior” capabilities that are similar with what I do for years with my SEDS and with tools from other Vendors, such as Netuitive, Integrien and ProactiveNet (BMC) that I have recently studied (check my older postings: http://itrubin.blogspot.com/2009/02/realtime-statistical-exception.html).
Special comment: In the OPNET white paper I read: "Metrics that exhibit deviations from normal are automatically identified and assigned scores based on “how abnormal” their behavior is."
This is very close to what I introduced in my 1st CMG paper in 2001("Exception Detection System, Based on the Statistical Process Control Concept" ) and called ExtraVolume of a metric (I call that now Exception Value (EV) meta-metric). In OPNET’s white paper referenced to that my CMG’01 paper, but they did not mention that they use very similar approach to rang exceptions (“Area Out vs. Limit Range In Metric Scoring”).
Here is example from my 1st CMG paper of the usage EV metric to build the TOP exceptional Unix servers list:
I had even tied to normalize that metric to some Unix benchmarks (TPC) to compare ranges of exceptional capacity usage ecross diferent type of servers and configurations. The example of the report is in the paper.
Al in all, it is a good news that another vendor has been adopting that technology (maybe with some of my work’s influence!). Based on my experience with OPNET tools (very limited, just ITD Guru for network and some server behavior simulations), that tool most likely can be trusted. To speak more I need at least to play with demo….
