Diagnosing ATM performance

The latest component in Concord Communications' Network Health network performance reporting and analysis suite could allow network managers to justify investments in their asynchronous transfer mode networks.

Network Health-ATM, which the Marlboro, Mass.-based company announced last week, leverages Concord's automated reporting technology to generate reports on ATM performance and usage that could help carriers determine the success of their ATM investments.

"Right now, network managers are squeezed between the need for better management and demands to justify the costs associated with ATM," said Brian Burba, product marketing manager for Concord. "By extending Network Health to ATM, we can enable managers to generate reports that handle both requirements."

The system, which supports ATM devices from several vendors, aggregates ATM traffic patterns, establishing baselines to provide a single, correlated view of key ATM performance statistics.

Managers can view usage and performance measurements from the physical port, logical path and logical channel layers and decide which lines, paths and channels should be upgraded or downgraded.

"This addition to Network Health gives carriers an easy end-to-end view of their networks," said John McConnell, president of McConnell Consulting. "The next logical step for this system is to leverage the data these modules collect and put them together into an even higher-level report, spanning WAN, LAN and application performance."