Insightix Enterprise 2.0 Review
Posted by Michael Tue, 04 Apr 2006 12:05:00 GMT
A few weeks ago, we reviewed Insightix Enterprise 1.5. Quick as a penguin chasing a herring, they released 2.0 on us. A round up of new features are:
- Automatic OS Signature Generator
- Offline Elements Support
- Inventory Right-Click Menu
- Detection of DHCP Servers
- Event History
- HTTPS Support
- SNMPv3 Support
What’s good?
The 2.0 product continues the “turn it on and it works” functionality that we enjoyed so much in the 1.5 review. In about 20 minutes, we had a real time picture (literally) of every device and virtual machine on our network.
The new features in the 2.0 release make the overall product feel more mature. We found a rouge DHCP service running on an old testing machine almost immediately. The inventory right click menu saves a bunch of time when editing an element and gives the browser interface a desktop like feel. The automatic OS signature generator reduced our unidentified OS count to a manageable handful.
There were a number of other features we really liked that aren’t so obvious unless you used the 1.5 version. Software release updates can now be applied and managed through the web interface. The configuration screens (that you don’t need to use very often) have a much more logical layout than the previous versions and the whole thing feels faster.
What’s not so good?
On the release date(today), they only support Internet Explorer for management. While IE may have 85% of the browser market share, we’d be willing to bet that Firefox is the vast majority in the data center. Official word is that some bugs related to Firefox couldn’t get fixed in time for the release date, but this is a real sore point. With Microsoft’s complete failure to fix a serious bug for a few more weeks, no good admin is using IE these days. It’s hard to even find a copy here in Penguin Land, we did manage to dig one up inside on old Xen virtual machine to do our testing. This release without broad browser support can be a deal killer for many shops.
The historical/offline feature needs some tweaking as well. If you have a device that drops off the network and then reenters with a different IP address, we found that sometimes it shows up as a separate (and unauthorized) device. This could get a little out of hand in a large DHCP range of machines but we think this might just be a little release day bug.
What’s next?
The new features make Insightix feel more like a mature product. They’ve added a number of features that make managing more than a few hundred devices much easier than their previous releases and the whole interface has a more snappy feel to it.
That being said, we can’t help but long for something more to do with all of this cool data that it gathers. We can view things like performance data in real time, but there’s no way to look at it historically. This means that we still need something else to collect and manage this exact same data and that something else is going to be much more intrusive to our network than Insightix is. Maybe an OBDC connection to the data, or a more flexible reporting interface would do the trick.
All together, Insightix does do exactly what they say it does, it gives you a real time view into your network without any fuss. There’s a simple elegance to the product that is very appealing and it fits very nicely into our “it just works” mantra.
On the east coast, you can buy Insightix from Assurance Data, Inc.
