WorldCom Inc. is giving its Private IP VPN customers a new way to monitor their service. It's an Internet-based, real-time monitor that collects network performance and historical information for IT managers looking to fine-tune their networks.

With the service, available now, WorldCom installs monitoring devices from Visual Networks Inc. throughout a corporate VPN. Each of the boxes measures availability, throughput, and other metrics. Data is sent to a Visual Networks server at WorldCom's network operations center that customers can access.

"Many of our frame-relay and ATM customers want to move to private IP," says Audrey Wells, senior manager for WorldCom's global VPN and data services. "Those customers are used to getting very detailed reports on their networks."

IT managers are able to label types of traffic as gold, silver, or bronze. Voice and video, for example, would be tagged gold because they can't withstand delay. But E-mail may be tagged bronze because delay isn't as important. Through the Web portal, IT managers can determine if each type of traffic is tagged properly based on the throughput and performance.

The one weakness, though, is that customers cannot make changes to the traffic types in real-time. If they want to move E-mail to silver, for example, they must call WorldCom and wait for the change. Depending on how complex the request is, the change could take anywhere from two hours to a full day, Wells says. "We know customers will want bandwidth on demand," she says. "We're definitely looking into it."