Performance Zone

NetScout — 2008-05-15T08:51:12-04:00

Gathering response time statistics from your critical enterprise applications is easier than you might think! In this video segment from Interop 2008 in Las Vegas, Matthias D'Autremont demonstrates how easy it is to quickly determine the response time of the network, the application servers, and the transaction transfer times.

A conversation with Pat Duyck - Managing Interop

NetScout — 2008-05-15T08:42:33-04:00

What’s it like to manage the network at InteropNet, the world’s largest temporary network? If you’re Pat Duyck, Principal Systems Engineer at NetScout, then you’re fortunate enough to have the entire NetScout solutions portfolio at your command. In this conversation with Pat, we’ll learn about his planning process for designing an integrated network management system, the methods he used for proactively monitoring Interop, and how he used NetScout’s solutions to manage this dynamic trade show environment.

Direct MP3 download:
Download 2008-05-12-NetScout_Podcast-Pat_Duyck-Managing_Interop_v2.mp3 (23310.1K)

Companies waste millions in unnecessary telecom charges

NetScout — 2006-12-14T13:45:01-05:00

If you haven't already, you may want to read this 12/7/06 Network World article called "Companies waste millions in unnecessary telecom charges". It covers a new Aberdeen Group survey that says a large portion of companies have inadequate control over telecom expenses, and are bleeding millions of dollars annually as a result.

Since the report was funded by a group of so-called telecom expense management vendors , it primarily tackles issues related to complicated bills and exorbitant late fees. But it doesn't go into any depth on how much it costs when a company unknowingly over-provisions its network or over-subscribes for bandwidth because it is blindly supporting non-business related activities. It doesn't talk about how applications that are authorized by senior management but perform inefficiently over the WAN can unnecessarily add to the telecom cost burden. It doesn't tell network managers how to distinguish between business and recreational uses of streaming audio and video.

Sure, you should get your act in gear and avoid paying late fees. We all know that. A more interesting approach to lower your telecom expenses is to fully understand your traffic mix today and leverage that information to plan properly for tomorrow.

NetScout User Forum Highlights: Educating the Masses on Network Misuse

NetScout — 2006-11-27T14:55:41-05:00

Certainly our annual NetScout User Forum conference in Vegas gave all attendees ample opportunity to test drive our latest products in a lab environment. Hands-on training is in fact one of the key reasons that people attend the NUF. But we also like to look deeper at typical problems that all attendees face. This year, a key topic for breakout discussion was one that everyone runs into: namely network misuse. Network misuse, as we saw it, takes many forms: too many trips to unauthorized (non-business) web sites, overtaxed bandwidth from streaming video, internet radio, instant messaging, and just plain ignorance about the effect of some types of network traffic.

It seems our users have had varying degrees of success convincing upper management that it is in fact a serious problem or whether management agrees on what to do about it, since you must trade off workflow for work environment. Our panel discussion on the Seven Deadly Sins of Network Abuse noted that education is certainly key. It's simply not enough to have a written policy on network use, or to report abusers, or even to block them: network operations must spend ample time on educating users about the effect of their behavior, and on relating to managers the true performance impact of "innocent" surfing.

And the problem is not going away. By one related calculation, this year's experts are predicting over 50% increase in online gift buying, mostly accomplished from the office.....A few minutes on the web at lunch is no big deal, what if most of your employees had the same idea at the same time? Awareness is key. Read what others had to say on the personal surfing at the office subject...

Eye on the Carriers

NetScout — 2006-11-22T12:25:23-05:00

In her latest "Eye On The Carriers" column for Network World , Johna Til Johnson explains her "immutable laws" of telco economics. In a nutshell, she says providers who deliver multiple services over the same pipe will win, as long as they invest in the customer service infrastructure that will assure those services meet or exceed customer expectations.

NetScout has been thinking along those same lines lately, and you'll see us at several service provider venues in upcoming months as a result-- including TeleManagement World in Dallas and 3GSM in Barcelona .

Providers we've been talking to know they need to:

Improve service levels. They need early-warning capabilities and rich diagnostics so they can limit the impact of performance disruption on revenue and customer satisfaction.

Ramp up new services faster. They need scalable, carrier-grade architecture that can easily be configured to track, monitor, and report against key high-value customers and newly deployed services.

Reduce MTTR. They want a top-down approach that provides comprehensive visibility into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), traffic flows, and packets to allow operations teams to rapidly identify, pinpoint and correct problems, even before customers are impacted.

Johnson is right and providers understand: network, customer and service assurance are interdependent, and are the keys to future success.

NetScout User Forum Conference Highlights: Partners' Points of View

NetScout — 2006-11-15T08:37:29-05:00

To place the nGenius Solution in the context of Service Management and Application Management, we invited Michael Procopio of HP and Bob Ure from Mercury Interactive to speak at NUF.

HP (fyi NetScout's integration with HP)
Michael's presentation focused on the effects of service management on the industry and IT professional such as people in the audience. According to Michael, the key task of network service management (NSM) is to ensure availability and performance of business services. Service driven operations (SDO) is transforming IT organizations from technology provider to business partner, from focusing on business stability to business agility, and from maintenance to innovation. For CIOs and service managers, SDO enables IT staff to provide their business with meaningful, current, and easy-to-understand visibility into the health and status of critical IT services. For IT operational staff, SDO provides the ability to operate the IT infrastructure more effectively and from a service-oriented perspective, and to prioritize work based on the most critical impact of IT service health to the business, increasing efficiency and producing more meaningful and measurable results.

Mercury Interactive
Bob's focus was on application performance lifecycle (APL) management. The key problems APL solves are increasing collaboration across silo'd teams; making it easier to replicate problems, testing for reality and planning for capacity; increasing confidence at "Go Live" by providing load testers visibility into production requirements; shortening time to resolution because testing adn operations utilize different tools; adn enabling more and faster test cycles to further mitigate risk. With the integration of Mercury's Business Availability Center (BAC) and NetScout's nGenius Solution, customers can be provided with a single, business-oriented console for consolidated network, server and application performance management mapped directly to their critical business services. This allows for tighter control of critical business processes, with flow-based High Definition network performance information that only NetScout can deliver, along with the correlation of infrastructure performance and end-user experience from Mercury.

NetScout User Forum Conference Highlights: An Industry Expert's Prediction

NetScout — 2006-10-29T14:48:59-05:00

At this year's NUF, we invited Jean-Pierre Garbani, Vice President at Forrester Research, to deliver a speech titled IT Operations: the Next Five Years.

I agree with him that service delivery is the next IT battle ground and competition is no longer a matter of technology but a matter of service availability and performance. Actually, that is what I see in the market place particularly in the service providers' space where I have been spending a lot of my time lately. If the ultimate goal is customer assurance, you really need to assure services and in order to assure services, your network availability and performance must be assured first.

The key takeaways from Mr. Garbani's presentation are: IT operations' evolution driver is going to be economics; simplification of infrastructures and automation will be the dominant themes of the next five years; vendors will have to adapt from a data collection-reporting model which takes advantage of diversity to a new model that promotes analytics and automation; and IT organizations will reduce the amount of manual tasks and align on management processes. I am pleased that our product roadmap is quite in sync with this industry trend, since we have been improving our nGenius Solution in the direction of more analytics, more automation, and more enhancement of network and application performance to assure business services.

Firefighting for Performance Monitoring, No More

NetScout — 2006-10-27T15:08:31-04:00

I promised you a full report on highlights from this year's NetScout User Forum conference, and there's certainly a lot of good things to pass on.

For example, I was encouraged to find our users in full throttle "nGenius troubleshooting mode" as part of their daily monitoring routine. We host an interactive Town Meeting session where the audience is polled on key questions that we (and they) ought to know about. The results are provided instantly. When asked how users approach their daily troubleshooting role, they had 6 options to choose from: firefighting most of the time, a mix of troubleshooting and regular monitoring, mostly regular monitoring, purely capacity planning, watching for potential problems, or proactive superhero.

By a comfortably wide margin, for 52% of the respondents the answer is a mix of firefighting and regular monitoring. Another 13% rely primarily on regular monitoring, and another 13% think of themselves as proactive superheroes.

In essence, there's less than 10% out there that still are caught up in full firefighting mode. So practically speaking, our users have adapted and are constantly trying to keep ahead of the curve, through proactive monitoring, detailed and spot data and trend analysis, and consumer education through data sharing. We like to think that the nGenius System helps on all of these fronts, and the numbers here bear this out.

Conquering the Chaos and Assure Optimal Performance

NetScout — 2006-10-19T11:14:12-04:00

I just returned from Las Vegas where NetScout held it's annual user conference. For those of you who could not make it, don't worry!! I will be posting the highlights over the next few posts to get you up to date :)

This is a very exciting time for NetScout to have held this event with the theme of Conquering the Chaos: Real Performance in a Virtualized World. A few months ago, we introduced our Application Fabric Performance Management Architecture to address the challenges of network and application performance management in an increasingly virtualized wolrd. Since then, virtualization is getting "hotter than hot," as Beth Schultz from Network World puts it in her article "All Things Virtual." Gartner believes that virtualization is the single most strategic technology in data centers today. In this virtualized world, application and service delivery infrastructures are evolving towards abstracted, loosely coupled architecture that increase the uncertainties and complexities facing the IT staff. At our user conference, we shared with our customers how we can partner together to meet the challenges and assure optimal performance of the application fabric--the interconnected virtualized resources implemented on the physical infrastructure.

Highlights of the show are coming your way soon!

Flow to Packet: Network Performance Management from A Service Provider's Perspective

NetScout — 2006-09-08T16:10:29-04:00

With increasingly converged and complex networked services, service providers are under a lot of pressure to deliver quality service and customer assurance. Key service enablers are playing ever more crucial roles and need to provide quick response for a good customer experience with the service. AAA servers, need to authenticate cell phone users each time the phone is turned on, DHCP servers need to dynamically assign IP addresses, DNS servers need to perform name to IP address translation. Any one of these service enablers being a weak link will negatively impact the service they are meant to serve.

Since there is no room for guesswork here, service providers place instrumentation in front of key service enablers such AAA , DNS, and DHCP servers as well as the application servers hosting the service (such as WAP - mobile WEB service on a cell phone). The instrumentation provides real-time end-to-end visibility into services delivered, the customers using them, and the network infrastructure delivering them.

With insight into critical KPIs and proactive automated problem detection and diagnostics, service providers can significantly reduce MTTR. Without such assurance, services could go south in a hurry. In other words, deeper service visibility delivers higher service quality control. This ability to see the whole picture on the flow-level and at the same time dive deep into targeted packet analysis whenever needed allows service providers to assure services and increase customer satisfaction.