NetQoS has updated its Performance Center suite of network management tools, adding new modules designed to alert administrators to potential problems and help pinpoint the cause as quickly as possible.

Performance Center is a suite of applications sold on a per-module basis, and typically delivered integrated into a network appliance.

Version 5.0, unveiled at the Interop conference in Las Vegas, adds an application performance dashboard, a real-time map of event notifications across an organisation's entire infrastructure, and a connector for Microsoft Excel that automates the generation of reports from Performance Center history.

"In this release, we've focused on adding value to staff on the helpdesk and in the network operations centre, rather than engineers and executives," said NetQoS marketing director Patrick Ancipink.

The new dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of the status of mission-critical applications, such as payroll or customer relationship management, not only within the datacentre but as measured from the customer's sites anywhere in the world.

If a problem shows up, the operator can drill down through the delivery tiers associated with each application to pinpoint the problem. They can even see the status of individual servers.

"A common thing is that a backup kicks in and that pushes CPU utilisation up so the server response time to users starts to increase," explained Performance Center product manager John Mao. The tool can show data gathered via the Simple Network Management Protocol to show what is happening.

Performance Center maps allow the operator to see a real-time indication of the entire network status that can highlight variations in performance.

"What we can show is not only availability, but the wider spectrum if an application is performing badly," said Mao.

The operator can drill down to a local topology view, and if necessary see all the vital statistics for a single server, including CPU, memory and network I/O utilisation.

"This is a big departure from what you get from other vendors. We give the operator the means to solve a problem, or escalate it to an engineer if necessary," Mao said.

Meanwhile, the NetQoS Connector for Microsoft Excel provides a set of function calls integrated into the spreadsheet tool that make it easier to extract data from Performance Center and build reports.

Also added to Performance Center are a couple of new features for network engineers. Advanced planning capabilities enable technicians to project network utilisation into the future for each link, application or user group to see where extra capacity will be needed and when.

NetQoS also claimed that Performance Center is the first network monitoring tool to detect and analyse anomalies across all data sources, including voice-over-IP and video traffic.

Pricing for NetQoS starts at $25,000 (£16,000) for the user console and a single module.