DCA REVIEW Industry Trends & Standards
Introducing application aware network performance management: The new equation for faster problem-solving
By Roger Holder, EMEA Field Marketing Manager, Fluke Networks.
ORGANISATIONS are increasingly dependent on the performance of their business applications – which, in turn, depend on the performance of their network infrastructure. To keep the business running smoothly, the performance of both applications and the network must be maintained at the highest levels.
The traditional approach has been to monitor network and application performance separately, using different systems run by different teams. However, this is becoming more difficult as virtualisation extends from the data centre to the desktop and the use of cloud services continues to grow. When application problems occur in a hybrid cloud environment, how does the organisation determine if the problem is located in their infrastructure or that of their cloud provider? Trying to work out who owns a problem when all groups are reporting green KPIs is increasingly difficult and time-consuming.
A recent survey* of network professionals conducted by Fluke Networks indicated that more than half do not have the tools they need to quickly and accurately identify issues with VoIP, applications and other network performance issues. Organisations need end-to-end visibility across layers 1-7, from the data centre to the branch office, if they are to identify the source of any performance problems quickly and solve them before incurring costly downtime.
The solution that has emerged is termed AANPM: Application Aware Network Performance Management, which is also referred to as Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD). In March Gartner published the first Magic Quadrant on the Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics market**, which foreshadows growth in this emerging technology market. It emphasises the need
for a single integrated solution to monitor, troubleshoot and analyse networks and— even more important—the applications and services they carry. Fluke Networks has been named as a Leader in the NPMD Magic Quadrant.
AANPM is a method of monitoring, analysing and troubleshooting both networks and applications. It takes an application-centric view of everything happening across the network, providing end-to-end visibility of the network and applications and their interdependencies, and enabling engineers to monitor and optimise the end user experience. It does not look at applications from a coding perspective, but in terms of how they are deployed and how they are performing.
By leveraging data points from both application and network performance methodologies, AANPM helps all branches of IT work together to ensure optimal performance of applications and network. It helps engineers overcome the visibility challenges presented by virtualisation, BYOD and cloud based services and identify problems anywhere along the network path. It also provides application performance data to identify when a user is experiencing
poor response times and which application component is contributing to the delay. This actionable performance data can be shared with the applications team to identify what led to the problem and which component needs attention.
In the data centre, organisation can realise tangible benefits from gaining visibility into where and when the network is busy. The ability to distinguish between critical business use and non-critical or recreational use, showing data in a form factor which they understand, helps to identify quickly which links need additional bandwidth and which can be reduced. This enables better control of IT budgets, allowing for future expansion through the analysis of growth patterns in application use.
Strictly speaking AANPM is defined as giving visibility across LAN, WAN and data centre environments – including all tiers of the server and application environment, whether virtual or physical – as well as layers 1-7, while supporting rates from 1 to 10Gbps. The AANPM solution developed by Fluke Networks extends this further by adding the ability to monitor and troubleshoot the wireless infrastructure and to support remote locations through a portable form factor if
May 2014 I
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