Fluke Extends Its Reach with TruView Troubleshooter

Fluke Networks, long known for its yellow handheld network test tools (see below), has continued a move up the network stack and launched the Visual TruView appliance, a tool which includes network monitoring and troubleshooting, at the Cisco Live event in London today. As befits a test leader, Fluke has got the product endorsed… by network test house Tolly.

Starting from its “industrial” test tools, Fluke has been steadily adding to its expertise in protocols and higher layer network technology, with moves such as the purchase of Wi-Fi specialist AirMagnet. Visual TruView increases its scope still further by including performance monitoring and troubleshooting in the one package.

Fluke salad

“It’s a new product and a new scope for us,” Ronald Sems, Fluke’s director of EMEA field marketing told TechWeekEurope at Cisco Live. “It goes beyond competitors such as Riverbed.”

Fluke thinks it’s meeting a need – it’s commissioned a survey of network professionals which apparently said that half of them “do not have the tools they need to identify issues with VoIP and other applications.” A lot of them have to “swivel chair” between tools, says Fluke, instead of having everything on one screen.

The test report from Tolly found the product was capable of capturing network data straight to disk at an impressive rate of 10Gbps, including multiple frame sizes and simultaneous packet and flow data.

It also noted the comprehensive time-correlated analysis in a single dashboard, and could be “deployed from racked to displaying network data in less than 15 minutes”.

By uniting the separate disciplines of performance monitoring and element managers, Fluke says it is giving network managers something new. It is also hoping the brand recognition of its yellow tools will win support in a new area.

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