In the article, industry analyst Jim Frey of EMA points out that, “network managers in the past didn’t have to worry about rate of change. It’s a much more dynamic environment.” This is especially true in today’s extended network environment, where IT manages an increasing number of geographically distributed applications and infrastructure with so many moving parts that something is nearly always broken or degraded. The widespread adoption of new technologies, such as server virtualization, network attached storage, and cloud computing provide greater flexibility, but new layers of management and complexity are added as well.

It’s really a pretty straightforward equation: complexity will increase proportionately to the rate of change in a network. And consequently, these environments require more manpower and resources to manage effectively. While the business expects flawless management of extremely complex environments, IT teams equipped with obsolete, manual tools are losing the battle. As Frey points out: “Network managers need to look at network performance data not in isolation but alongside information about active applications and services, who’s using them, and what kind of experience users are getting.”

The article goes on to identify five practical strategies to help network managers get the most bang from their network management investment. Here is the prioritized list, along with some notes as to how ExtraHop can support many of these initiatives:

1. Consolidation of network management tools

Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell notes that “consolidating tools offers many benefits, including real tool integration, better service perspective, quicker incident resolution and higher service reliability.” Our customers have witnessed this benefit first hand. That’s not to say that you should go out and dump all of your agents and network performance management tools. Rather, you should carefully evaluate which tools you’re really using and only keep those that are providing the most value. It’s not uncommon for some larger enterprises to have 100+ tools operating in their environment—and these same environments could probably reduce this by a tenth without making any real compromises. In fact, this leaner approach should have a net positive effect since so much bloat would be removed from the system.

2. Invest in network configuration and change management (NCCM) tools

Frey goes on to say in the article: “getting you the data more quickly about what has changed requires more automated discovery and automated monitoring. You’re not going to get that without good, quality tools that have the ability to keep up with that rate of change.” The ExtraHop system auto-discovers devices that are present on the monitored networks, inferring device names and roles through real-time traffic analysis. Devices are categorized automatically by role, such as webserver, database, or directory server. This makes the ExtraHop system perfect for network configuration and change management.

3. Increase application awareness

Frey also says: “make sure you have awareness of not just what’s in your network but how it’s being used to deliver applications and services. It’s surprising to me how many shops still don’t know what apps are being used on the network, which ones are really driving the use of the network, and which ones oftentimes are the source of problems when there are slowdowns.” This of course is where the ExtraHop system truly shines, since it was designed specifically with the application tier in mind. The ExtraHop system performs full-stream reassembly and full content analysis in order to analyze all application transactions in real time and extract meaningful health and performance metrics.

4. Pay for analysis, not monitoring

A good monitoring solution is going to include advanced analytics alongside monitoring capabilities. The ExtraHop system employs a wide array of intelligent protocol modules to inspect and analyze network traffic. These modules understand application wire protocols at the transaction level, extracting valuable health and performance information in real time. The ExtraHop system performs analysis for protocols across the network, web, database, storage, and directory-services tiers, providing IT personnel with the ability to truly understand what’s happening across their network and applications.

5. Exploit untapped capabilities in existing toolsets

“Spend a little time, get out the manuals, and figure if there are other features within the tools you own that you’re not taking advantage of. There almost always are,” says Frey. The ExtraHop system is extremely easy to deploy. It auto-discovers devices that are present on the monitored networks, then delivers rich analytics through a web UI that supports advanced workflows for accelerated troubleshooting. At ExtraHop, we are committed to making our customers successful. If you think you could be getting more out of your ExtraHop system, don’t sift through the manual. Just ask us! We’re happy to help.

What strategies have you identified to help you maximize your network performance management investment? Tell us in the comments.

His premise is simple enough: companies have relied on service level agreements (SLAs) for years now to ensure that acceptable service levels are clearly laid out and agreed to by both parties. This not only provides accountability but also articulates consequences if agreed upon service levels are not adequately met. So why not apply that same principal to internal departments that are responsible for delivering services? This is precisely what many forward-thinking enterprises are now doing to better understand not only their own cost structures, but also how different departments are leveraging internally delivered services.

As Michael points out, “lots of IT organizations use an informal metric for measuring how satisfied employees are with application performance: If they aren’t calling the help desk, things must be OK.” As is often the case, the vast majority of employees aren’t going to make much of a fuss over sluggish application performance and consequently, IT often doesn’t know there’s a problem—a problem which is likely becoming worse. This is why it’s becoming a priority for IT to understand where applications are failing as early as possible to ensure that network hiccups don’t cascade into application downtime.

Using the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system, you can take a number of steps to ensure that SLAs are achieved, including:

• Alert on problems before SLA violations occur. The ExtraHop system sends notifications when issues like network slowdowns, applications errors, and slow DB processing times are detected.
• Fix intermittent issues. The ExtraHop system passively analyzes all transactions on the wire in real time to isolate intermittent failures and slowdowns, improving service assurance.
• Proactively detect anomalies. The ExtraHop system learns normal behavior based on historical context and provides trend-based alerts to warn of potential problems.
• Increase service transparency. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. The ExtraHop system can baseline and analyze services passively with no overhead at all. Try it for yourself at NetworkTimeout.com.

Does your organization use internal SLA’s? If so, tell us in the comments.

In an effort to make this offering as ubiquitous and available as possible, we built it on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The biggest technical challenge was adapting the technology in our real-time network appliance to work in the cloud. We built the ExtraHop system to run a single software instance on a single device, but we didn’t want to spin up an EC2 instance for each analysis because of cost. Instead, we modified our code to enable multiple copies of our product to run side by side on the same server. We now can spin up additional EC2 instances when needed, enabling us to easily scale up (and down) as user demand changes.

Overall, our experience with AWS has been great. Here are some additional details of our set-up:

• Users’ packet captures are securely stored to S3 so they can re-run analysis on any of their previously uploaded packet captures
• We have one director instance that serves up the NetworkTimeout.com homepage and the forums
• The director instance proxies requests to the appropriate service instance when users are interacting with the ExtraHop product
• We opted to run our own database and store the data on an EBS volume
• The forum uses phpBB
• We participated in an Amazon beta program to set-up reverse DNS on our elastic IP, which made it less likely for our registration emails to be marked as spam (even though we relay through another email server)

Like so many enterprise organizations these days, Alaska Airlines maintains a complex infrastructure where every transaction truly matters. Consequently, when things slow down or stop working all together, quickly identifying the root cause of an issue is directly tied to revenue. But rather than pointing fingers, Alaska’s IT department now goes straight to the ExtraHop system to identify these root causes for faster remediation. As Alaska’s director of IT operations, Chris Grey comments in the article:

“ExtraHop sits over our entire production network today and gives everybody the ability to dig into the same data using the same interface and tool set… It’s plugging quite a few holes in visibility that we had had using perimeter monitoring and other specific tools.”

Prior to using the ExtraHop system, Alaska Airlines’ IT team first had to be aware that a problem was occurring (not as easy as it sounds), and then the IT team would use native operating system tools to manually assess the health of the infrastructure running their Informix database servers. To obtain specific transaction-level metrics, they had to turn on database profiling, a time consuming step to take in the production environment due to high performance overhead.

The ExtraHop system provides an integrated view across all tiers, and with the ExtraHop database module, Alaska Airlines’ Informix databases could be observed continuously from a passive, zero-overhead perspective, with full-stream reassembly and full content analysis of the traffic to record both network- and application-level metrics. This information saved their IT team countless hours, providing proactive early warning of new problems and revealing the root causes of slowness and intermittent errors, all without the need for system-wide database profiling.

Do you have an anecdote regarding ExtraHop you would like to share? Tell us in the comments!

It’s all worth it, though, as we’ll be joined at the Summit by several hundred F5 customers, partners, and staff, as well as exhibitors, including Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, and NetApp, to name but a few. The Summit will showcase some of the latest technologies that are helping shape the future of agile infrastructure.

Kicking things off on Monday morning is a welcome and F5 update keynote session with John McAdam, F5 President & CEO, and Dave Feringa, F5 VP of Sales, Americas. Check out the rest of the keynotes for some great topics and speakers. There will also be a cool event on Tuesday evening at The Field Museum where we’ll meet Sue and then listen to Grammy Award Winning Bluesman Robert Cray.

F5 is, of course, where our founders Jesse and Raja made a name for themselves with the development of the BIG-IP v9 product. And now we’re proud to count F5 as one of our key technology partners. To learn more about how the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system can help optimize application delivery controllers, check out our Load Balancer/ADC solutions page.

And if you’re planning to visit the Windy City for the F5 Summit, please make sure to drop by our booth.

We did a few rounds of a straight-forward 8GB sequential read and write for each drive.

Here are the results from the write test (time in seconds to write an 8GB file directly to the USB device):

Kymera Magic Wand Universal Remote control

Nintendo Wii

Flip HD Camera

It’s also your chance to meet with some of the ExtraHop Networks founding executives, including our CEO, Jesse Rothstein. Several of ExtraHop’s Technology Partners will also be exhibiting, including Anue Systems and Gigamon, so you can see how the ExtraHop system is aligning with other leading technology providers.

We’ll be in booth #2342. Hope to see you there!

The event will feature a series of seminars on trends in the technology market, including a keynote from David Reilly, Managing Director and Global CIO of Enterprise Infrastructure for Morgan Stanley. Senior members of the Morgan Stanley Technology Staff will hold in-depth seminars to provide customer perspective on pertinent IT topics. In addition, Morgan Stanley’s Investment Banking team will present a seminar on the M&A and IPO markets.

The Enterprise Infrastructure (EI) group at Morgan Stanley manages over $1.3 billion in technology infrastructure spending, with over 3,200 resources serving all of Morgan Stanley around the globe. This group clearly understands complexity.

Good luck, guys! Make us proud.

We received some great news a few weeks back: ExtraHop has been selected as one of just three companies to present at Globespan Capital’s Bi-Annual Technology Briefing Lunch taking place on May 25^th in Boston. Globespan’s CIO Advisory Board is comprised of select CIO’s from Fortune 1000 companies and government organizations who represent a wide range of industries including financial services, high technology, manufacturing, and consumer goods. This group of technology experts meets twice every year to discuss evolving technology trends and emerging enterprise needs. They also collaborate on projects in specific technology areas with Globespan’s investment team.

Globespan Capital Partners is a leading global venture capital firm with over $1 Billion under active management and has invested in many notable technology companies, including: Akorri, BladeLogic, Brocade, Cerulean Technology, Fortisphere, oDesk, and Palo Alto Networks, to name but a few.

Here is a picture of Jesse with the judges on the Interop main stage holding our two newest awards!

Congratulations to all of the winners. Here is the official InformationWeek Analytics press release.