Proactive management may be one of the most overused phrases in enterprise management. Every management vendor promises it; but historically few have actually delivered it, at least not in an affordable form. But two new solutions being rolled out this week look promising. Today equipment vendor Extreme Networks is launching a suite of hosted network and application performance monitoring tools. Tuesday CentrePath follows suit with its Magellan DataPath Manager, which is designed to take on both LAN and WAN management.

Though it remains to be seen how effective each of the solutions is in the field, both are at least aimed in the right direction, with both predictive troubleshooting and affordability selling features of both. We will keep an eye on how they do and let you know what the reaction of users is.

I am also interested in hearing your thoughts on your current crop of management applications with regard to how proactive they are. Please take a minute to take our new poll and let us know if they are helping you get ahead of trouble.