Take the Lead on WAN Application Delivery by Putting Performance First

But network professionals who are content to rest on their fault management laurels risk being buffeted by the forces of WAN performance issues and expectations bearing down upon them with increasing volume and complexity. Not only are performance issues growing dramatically due to data center consolidation, the rise of multimedia traffic and other trends, but also the responsibility for application delivery is increasingly falling on the shoulders of network professionals. As a result, infrastructure availability and utilization can no longer be the sole gauges of network health.

Network engineers and managers have an option to take the lead on application delivery with a “Performance First” approach to managing their complex networks. By shifting their focus from fault management—which is largely under control—to performance-based management, network professionals can concentrate on how the network is affecting service delivery and make themselves more relevant to the business units they serve.

“Performance is the thousand shades of gray between those red and green lights indicating whether devices are up or down, and network engineers and managers must switch from an up/down model of network management to a ‘Performance First’ model to quantify what the end user is experiencing,” said Joel Trammell, CEO of Austin, Texas-based NetQoS, Inc., a provider of network performance management software and services to Global 2000 companies.

The Performance First Imperative

The Performance First paradigm inverts the traditional, bottom-up device monitoring approach and begins with top-down visibility into overall performance of applications running over the network. This approach is driven by the fundamental purpose of the network infrastructure—to transport data from one end of the system to the other as rapidly as possible. The more efficiently data flows at the transport layer the better the application performance. This end-to-end response time measurement is the best measure to use when deciding how to optimize the network, plan new infrastructure rollouts and upgrades, and identify the severity and pervasiveness of problems.

The Performance First paradigm requires monitoring three key metrics, starting with end-to-end response time measurement for an overall view of network performance: (1) end-to-end performance (2) traffic flows, and (3) device availability and utilization, as illustrated in Figure 1 (NPC Graphic).

End-to-end Performance Monitoring: To track, measure, and analyze application performance for all user transactions from end to end for insight into the end user experience and the source of any latency issues.

Whether troubleshooting a bottleneck, monitoring a new application rollout, or upgrading the network infrastructure, a Performance First management approach starts by understanding and base-lining end-to-end performance. End-to-end performance monitoring gauges how well the network is delivering services to the end user and provides the best overall view of what is happening on the network.

Traffic Analysis: To visualize and analyze the composition of network traffic on specific links. This yields the information needed to redirect or reprioritize application traffic, or add capacity.

With end-to-end performance metrics captured and the source of latency isolated, further analysis is much more focused. Traffic analysis enables network engineers to understand the composition of traffic on specific links where latency is higher than normal or expected. This yields the information needed to redirect or reprioritize application traffic, or add capacity.

Device Performance Management: To poll network infrastructure components to isolate the source of problems such as a busy router or a server memory leak so that corrective action can be taken.

If the source of latency is isolated to an infrastructure component—a busy router or a server memory leak, for instance—network managers need device performance management capabilities to poll the device in question and pinpoint the reason so that corrective action can be taken.

If latency cannot be attributed to the network or the server infrastructure and can be shown to be isolated in the application itself, the network team is armed with the proof that will eliminate the typical finger-pointing between IT infrastructure and application teams.

The NetQoS Performance Center

Recognizing the absence of management tools to support the Performance First management paradigm, NetQoS set out at the turn of the millennium to fill the void. Since that time, it has introduced products to address each of the three key metrics necessary to quantify network infrastructure performance: end-to-end performance, traffic flow analysis, and device performance. Each is designed to scale to support the world’s largest and most complex networks. Together, the products leverage industry standard instrumentation to provide network managers the global visibility needed to monitor performance SLAs, troubleshoot problems, and plan for growth, all without the use of desktop or server agents.

The NetQoS Performance Center is a management portal that integrates the three NetQoS products, allowing network managers and IT executives to view the role-specific metrics they need with real-time data and historical trends in a single Web-based dashboard.

The Advantages of the NetQoS Performance First Approach

Using the NetQoS Performance Center product modules, NetQoS customers have realized the following benefits:

Deliver consistent application performance and measure it: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Without real-time visibility into end user response times, traffic flows, and infrastructure health, it’s impossible to manage application performance proactively. Too often IT managers have no way of knowing how well their organization or service provider is meeting its performance targets.

This was the case for NetQoS customer MPS Group, a Fortune 1000 provider of staffing, consulting, and solutions in the disciplines of information technology, finance and accounting, law, engineering, and healthcare. The MPS Technical Services Group delivers business-critical applications and utility technology services to approximately 10,000 employees and contractors in 200 U.S. offices from its data center in Jacksonville, Fla. As an affiliation of companies with a distributed branch model, MPS wanted to personalize IT expectations for the different business units and locations, but had few tools in place to objectively measure and report performance.

According to MPS CIO Richard White, the goal was to let the business units know that “Technical Services is providing a consistent and required level of service and reacting quickly if something goes wrong.” MPS sought to mirror the real business experience location by location by mapping the key applications to service levels and measuring end-to-end response times.

With NetQoS SuperAgent, the company found a tool that could measure end-to-end performance, monitor SLA compliance, gauge the impact of infrastructure changes, and assist in troubleshooting application performance problems for each of its locations in a cost-effective, non-intrusive manner. Using SuperAgent, MPS now has visibility into its front and back office applications and can monitor and hone the SLAs in place with its internal as well as external customers.

“NetQoS SuperAgent is the tool that has given our SLAs reporting credibility,” said MPS CIO Richard White. “Before SuperAgent, we had no level of performance granularity. We reported on the measures we had rather than on what was meaningful.”

Make more informed infrastructure investments: When infrastructure managers make uninformed upgrade decisions, the cost can be high. Often the anticipated results don’t materialize, ROI is negative, and performance problems persist.

For instance, Sutter Health, a Sacramento, Calif.-based family of hospitals and physician organizations serving more than 100 Northern California communities, is moving to multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) as its WAN technology and is using NetQoS NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer to determine exactly how much bandwidth is needed on the MPLS interfaces it is purchasing. Sutter is also using ReporterAnalyzer to measure performance across the MPLS network.

Work collaboratively and more effectively to reduce MTTR: Network managers need tools that give them real-time global visibility and historical information to optimize the network infrastructure for application performance and work with peer groups to plan for changes. Also, knowing the source of availability and performance problems means the right technicians may be assigned immediately, and having detailed diagnostic information means they can fix problems quickly.

“The ability to go to one place to view and analyze end-to-end application performance, application traffic flow, and network device statistics significantly reduces the time required to resolve network issues,” said John Warren, Internet technology manager for Portland-based ESCO Corp., a global group of companies that manufactures engineered metal parts and components for industrial applications. “The NetQoS Performance Center not only provides this capability, but it also gives us a quick and convenient way to create custom views for different groups in our organization. For example, our help desk team has a view tailored specifically to their needs.”

According to MPS CIO White, SuperAgent has provided a common tool within the internal IT organization to analyze how the environment (network, servers and applications) is behaving. SuperAgent has taken away much of the guesswork, enabling the network, systems and application groups to dissect issues and pinpoint and solve the problems more easily and quickly.

Phoenix-based Avnet Inc., one of the world’s largest distributors of electronic components, deployed NetQoS SuperAgent and ReporterAnalyzer to fulfill its IT initiative to analyze and improve the experience of all end users when accessing its key business applications.

“NetQoS SuperAgent and ReporterAnalyzer now provide the network and application data our IT groups need to track performance, address problems, and plan for future needs,” said Bob Prezkop, Avnet’s senior vice president of enterprise infrastructure and managed technologies. “The result has been better efficiency between the IT groups. For example, the ability to isolate an issue to the network, application or server enables us to direct the problem to the right group for faster troubleshooting.”

“Network issues that used to take Sutter days to analyze and resolve now take minutes with ReporterAnalyzer,” said Sam Warnke, Senior Network Engineer for Sutter Health.

Conclusion

IT can no longer manage networks in isolation from the applications they support. Traditionally IT staff built their network management practices around infrastructure availability and fault management. Today most networks are available more than 99 percent of the time and increasing management and user expectations for fast, trouble-free networked applications requires a shift from a device-centric to a performance-centric focus.

NetQoS is the only company that delivers a complete suite of products for applying the performance-first network management approach. NetQoS products are used to manage large enterprise networks, including a majority of the world’s 50 largest companies including AIG; Avnet; Barclays Global Investors; Bed, Bath, & Beyond; Chevron; Deutsche Telekom; NASA, Schlumberger; Turner Broadcasting Systems; and Verizon.