"In recent years, IP multicast has become the accepted protocol for broad-based data distribution - acting as the foundation for such business applications as e-learning, streaming media, and financial data distribution. As the importance of these applications continues to increase, companies need to ensure these services can be managed in alignment with the rest of their business-critical IT infrastructure," said Elisabeth Rainge, Director of Network Management, IDC.

InCharge IP Multicast Manager offers enterprise and service provider customers the unprecedented ability to discover, visualise, and monitor IP multicast services. Additionally, the solution is a unique tool for discovering and visualising the multicast entities and behaviours in a network. Users can view membership of multicast groups, layout of multicast trees, active sessions and protocol entities, and understand how these relate to the underlying IP network.

Like all InCharge solutions, InCharge IP Multicast Manager leverages the InCharge Common Information Model (ICIM) to represent entities in the network domain, and Codebook Correlation Technology to pinpoint the root cause of alarms it receives. InCharge's unique cross-domain correlation capability enables InCharge to correlate multicast domain events with network connectivity failures, diagnosing the physical network failure as the root cause, and multicast failures as impacts of that root cause problem.

"Leveraging our next-generation analysis, automation and abstraction technologies, InCharge IP Multicast Manager is the only solution of its kind with the ability to correlate issues in the multicast infrastructure with problems in the underlying IP network," said SMARTS Director of Product Marketing Dave Walters. "This functionality is critical as companies strive to speed mean time-to-repair and ensure the highest levels of availability of these next-generation, business-critical services."

InCharge IP Multicast Manager works in conjunction with InCharge IP Availability Manager and Service Assurance Manager to:

Automatically populate the initial InCharge IP Multicast topology.

Discover and support devices running various multicast protocols including PIM, IGMP, MSDP, ANYCAST, and Auto RP.

Discover multicast entities including Designated Routers (DR), Rendezvous Points (RP), Bootstrap Routers (BSR), Sources, IGMP Receiving sub-networks, Multicast Groups and mapping agents.

Visualize multicast trees overlaying the IP network.

Monitor routers in the receiving IGMP sub-networks for DR changes.

Collect and monitor traffic statistics and notify threshold crossings on a per-group basis to monitor for silent sources or lack of traffic over a multicast route.

Notify threshold crossings on a per-group basis to monitor for over-utilization in a segment of the multicast route.

Perform impact analysis to diagnose the effect of L2/L3 and physical failures on multicast entities.

Perform non-intrusive monitoring, using SNMP MIBS, to avoid non-scaleable telnet or inline snooping.