NIKSUN Announces NetOmni
The Real-time Global View into your Network

October 15, 2007 – NIKSUN, the leading provider of real-time security surveillance, forensic analysis, compliance and performance monitoring solutions, is pleased to announce the release of NetOmni™, an IT service delivery management portal that equips customers with virtual views into all critical service delivery parameters across converged networks.

Supervising systems for network and application performance, security, compliance and VoIP, NetOmni leverages NIKSUN’s patent-pending Knowledge Warehouse model for a unique combination of real-time, network-wide traffic analysis and data granularity to assist with reporting and troubleshooting. NetOmni bestows users with personalized windows into applications and networks, graphically monitoring the health of networks and services. With its universal, easy-to-read view of the network, NetOmni accords quick recognition of anomalies and facilitates resolution by allocating drill-down capabilities into causal areas.

Enterprise IT infrastructure today is an intricate aggregation of multi-tiered applications, events and WAN/LAN/MAN environments. With mission critical applications carrying classified, actionable information across geographically distributed networks, it becomes essential to monitor traffic for continuously reliable transmissions. While seemingly straightforward, overseeing a legion of high-speed, multi-protocol network services to ensure a safely encapsulated information transfer that guarantees business performance becomes an overwhelming and time-consuming task. 

NIKSUN’s NetOmni solution, in conjunction with the rest of the NIKSUN Enterprise Suite, turns this exasperating chore into an experience pleasant enough to enjoy with a cup of coffee and a danish.

Simplifying Business Services Delivery
NetOmni expands NIKSUN’s enterprise suite by elaborating how IT infrastructure is impacting a business. By monitoring all critical applications and services via a sensor-equipped, graphical dashboard, NetOmni consolidates traffic from disparate data sources across converged networks and gives users an immediate field of vision into real-time intelligence. These sensors visualize prioritized performance and security statistics, allowing for instant recognition of service delivery delays, security breaches or performance deterrents, which can then be overcome by initiating optional scripts.

With its intuitive graphical interface, fortified to adapt to user preferences, NetOmni maintains relevant and unimpaired cognition of an enterprise’s network. This maximizes the availability and credibility of crucial business applications and aligns IT investments with business priorities by reducing operating risk and costs, improving business efficiency and establishing opportunities for rightsizing, consolidation and decreasing mean time to insight.

Simplifying Service Management
Simply put, NIKSUN NetOmni extracts real-time information from NIKSUN's distributed Knowledge Warehouse that resides in the following NIKSUN appliances deployed on the network. These appliances aggregate, time stamp and index live data from packet capture, NetFlow, SNMP, RTCP/RTP and IDS events:

• NetVCR® (real-time capture of performance statistics)
• NetDetector® (full-packet appropriation and indexing of security events)
• NetDetector Live™ (live replication of security and policy compliance events)

NetOmni displays user-defined intelligence and pertinent information on its dashboard for an at-a-glance understanding of consolidated traffic performance and security metrics. It is possible to view events, be alerted to and investigate security deterrents, troubleshoot performance lags and conduct exhaustive diagnostic analysis of any particular event. The dashboard equips users with options to customize view parameters and plot a plethora of variables, some of which are network round-trip time, flight time, application and server response time, utilization, bit rate, VoIP (MOS, packet delay, jitter), IDS, anomaly and policy compliance events such as port and host scans, denial of service attacks and confidentiality data breaches.

The Cup of Coffee
Information extracted from the NIKSUN Knowledge Warehouse can be grouped by business units, customers, networks, remote sites, applications and other client specified parameters. Each user can rank priorities and build a personalized global window into the network based on established preferences.

For example, CIOs may configure their NetOmni dashboard displays to visually summarize multiple IT disciplines into a simple go/no-go framework. A quick look at such a personalized dashboard can answer pivotal questions, such as: Are all my web servers running? Do I have any security events that need immediate attention? Are any components of my online sales infrastructure offline? Are any related processes impaired? Is any confidential data leaving my network?

From an IT manager’s viewpoint, NetOmni is flexible enough to correlate data sets and illustrate pertinent summaries. What subsets of servers in my data centers are undermined? Has the performance of my VoIP infrastructure changed in the last 60 seconds? Has it changed in the past 60 days? Have any constituents of my network just failed? How do I provide detailed analysis of an application for a developer to fix? Have any of my servers been hacked or compromised? Has any unauthorized activity occurred on the network? Are users complying with all internal policies? These are only a few of the persistent quandaries an IT manager faces on a daily basis that NetOmni answers with surprising intuition, accuracy and speed.

Bonus: The Danish
NetOmni allows users to “keep the troubleshoot”. That is, solve a unique or difficult problem once, and then embed that process back into the tool as an additional monitoring criterion. 

Equipping users to access NIKSUN knowledge centers for live displays of atomic information, NetOmni plots basic network statistics in real time using a variety of graphical widgets which can then be exported via XML or other preferred formats. Complex real time searches and analysis that combine variegated elements, such as IP Address ranges, packet data content, unauthorized activity on key servers and protocol flags, can be put together to form a continuously updating widget. If preferred, optional scripts defined by the user in PERL or a programming language of choice can kick-off an infinite possibility of automatic responses to an event.

With the unique NIKSUN technology of drilling down to events from real time data to packet level information, NetOmni has astute visualization capabilities that aid diagnosis and can quickly determine and interrogate irregularities. NetOmni seamlessly interoperates with NIKSUN’s network-wide traffic analysis tool, NetTrident™, NIKSUN's remote appliance management tool, Central Manager™ and NIKSUN’s data aggregation and reporting tool, NetX™. This combination creates an extremely potent enterprise solution suite that retains 100% real-time visibility of a converged network in a scalable, cost effective manner.

“The advent of new paradigms for network monitoring and surveillance has led to a proliferation of data and information from various sources,” explains Dr. Parag Pruthi, the CEO and Founder of NIKSUN Inc. “While this plethora of data has empowered network and security managers, efficient analysis of the data is difficult to perform without visual and customized representations. For a moment, think about raw data that represents elevation data in geology - one can portray this as a three-dimensional table with one column representing latitude, another depicting longitude and the third illustrating elevation. Now think about various visual ways in which this (and other related) data can be exhibited; as a regular grid, triangulated irregular network, contours or maybe even with use of orthophoto images. Now imagine that each analyst could take the raw data and reproduce it in various customized ways to suit a diversity of tasks and automatically act upon live changes in a continuous monitoring environment. This is exactly what NetOmni does for network and security analysts.”

“It is an exciting time,” continues Dr. Pruthi. “With modern high-bandwidth networks carrying heterogeneous information over the wire at blistering speeds, it is important for security providers to match solutions with enterprise thinking on the logic graph. That is what NIKSUN does best,” he reflects. “We don’t just secure networks, we attend to customers and their businesses. We do what they need us to do.  Initially, NetOmni incorporates data and analysis from a limited but rich set of sources, but over time it grows to encompass analysis, representation and automation from all sources. It is essentially a highly scalable framework which we are sure will become the de-facto standard in network/security analytics.”

ABOUT NIKSUN, Inc.
NIKSUN is the recognized global leader in providing award-winning security, compliance and network performance management solutions. The company's powerful, flexible and scalable solutions deliver unprecedented insight in real time. Patented real-time analysis and recording technology enable enterprises, service providers and governments to reliably and confidently secure network infrastructure and services. NIKSUN, headquartered near Princeton, New Jersey, USA, has sales offices in major cities throughout the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information on NetOmni or other products, please call 1-888-504-3336. NIKSUN, NetOmni, NetTrident, NetX and Central Manager are either registered trademarks or trademarks of NIKSUN, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.