Abstract:
NerveCenter was one of the first network management platforms in the industry, providing full Fault and Performance Management. Originally created by a company called NetLabs, ports of the software were created by AT&T and NCR under AT&T UNIX and NCR UNIX MP-RAS. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl joined NetLabs in 1991 - Perl is heavily integrated into NerveCenter. NerveCenter was known to scale well, back in 1996. NerveCenter was later purchased by Seagate, Veritas, Open Service Inc., and is now owned by LogMatrix.
New Release:
LogMatrix recently released NerveCenter 6.0. Features include: MIB Browser, Windows 2008R2 support, data enrichment.
Strengths:
NerveCenter provides a platform to model the health of systems using multi-state finite state machines. Most systems understand up/down (Durable Events under SMARTS / EMC Ionix / EMC ITOI) or monitoring single events (Momentary Events under SMARTS / EMC Ionix / EMC ITOI.) The user community can easily provision their own rules by visually building a finite state machine in a drag & drop environment - perhaps the simplest configuration available in any network management platform today.
Weaknesses:
There used to be a bundled reporting tool. Graphs were able to be produced, using logged data, with the option to view and print reports. This feature was supported by NetLabs in addition to an AT&T (who ported a copy of NerveCenter to SVR4.)
NerveCenter came from an environment which provided a clean and fast X Windows Interface. This interface was exchanged, for a bulky Win32 interface (which cross-compiled into an even bulkier X Windows interface) for the benefit of fat Windows client.
Basics Video:
The following video clip describes a basic fundamental building blocks in NerveCenter.
