In April 2010, Network Instruments® announced the availability of Observer Infrastructure (OI), an integral element of their Observer® performance management solution, which complements their primary packet-oriented network and application performance monitoring products with an infrastructure viewpoint. An evolutionary replacement for Network Instruments Link Analyst™, OI has been significantly expanded and includes network infrastructure device health monitoring, IP SLA active testing, NBAR an...

There is a common issue I deal with when speaking to end users trying to monitor applications. This confusion is partially created by vendors who would like to position themselves in the hot APM market, yet they clearly don’t enable performance monitoring. These vendors are slowly starting to correct the messaging, but many have poor market understanding, and continue to confuse buyers. There are two types of monitoring technologies, one is availability monitoring and the other performance monit...

 If you are like the average network professional, Wireshark is probably a part of your   regular troubleshooting arsenal. And, why not? It's the tool by which you learned       network analysis. Its flexibility in licensing, no-cost download, and familiarity, make it a logical choice to deploy to capture and analyze packets. But, what might your network team be missing, if it depends solely on Wireshark for network monitoring? We'll look at a two-solution appr...

The practice of network availability monitoring can range from simple standalone up/down monitoring of individual devices to complex, highly customized and automated approaches that fully integrate into broader management systems architectures. ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) analysts define the term "Enterprise Network Availability Monitoring System" (ENAMS) to include network-centric monitoring solutions that are used by enterprise network operations and engineering teams to discover,...

The following are four reasons why you should utilize Application Performance Management (APM) tools: 1. INCREASED REVENUE AND PROFITABILITY APM products ensure that bottom line costs are controlled through monitoring and discovery. APM technology also allows business to maximize the efficiency per employee by reducing downtime and increasing productivity per employee, which translates into retaining customers, better quality of service and improved brand positioning amongst potential customers....

Now capable of storing 96 TB of network and application traffic for analysis in a single 5U chassis, the GigaStor Expandable scales to over a petabyte and beyond with additional units. It is the highest-capacity retrospective network analysis solution on the market today. Other popular GigaStor models offering enhanced storage capacity include the GigaStor Portable and GigaStor 10 Gb Wire Speed. The self-contained mobile troubleshooting system GigaStor Portable now stores 4 TB and 8 TB of date. ...

Now capable of storing 96 TB of network and application traffic for analysis in a single chassis, the GigaStor Expandable scales to over a petabyte and beyond with additional units. It is the highest-capacity retrospective network analysis solution on the market today.* To further put the size of a petabyte into perspective - if the average smartphone camera photo is 3MB in size and the average printed photo is 8.5 inches wide, then the assembled petabyte of photos placed side by side would be o...

Security is a top concern for anyone running a network today. The recent Heartbleed bug and other high-profile hacks have shined a new light on the fact that security strategies in the enterprise must constantly evolve to meet the challenges of new and ever-changing attacks. In the spring of 2014 news of the Heartbleed bug hit the wire sending the tech world scrambling to patch the now notorious OpenSSL vulnerability that allowed individuals to steal private information like certificate keys, pa...

According to the IDC, nearly 5 million 10 Gb ports were shipped in the third quarter of 2013, surpassing the number of Gigabit switches for the first time since the technology was introduced in 2001. That's a lot of upgrades, but with Big Data analysis, VoIP, video, and other bandwidth-intensive applications gobbling up more and more network resources, it's no surprise. The real challenge for many network teams today is managing performance monitoring expectations in the new 10 Gb environment, a...

Multi-tiered applications are no longer the exception but the rule. In the past, assessing application performance meant monitoring response time and health on a single server hosting one application. Now, with the applications increasingly becoming virtualized, utilizing multiple protocols, and operating over multiple servers, the approach to tracking overall application performance needs a reboot. So how do you effectively track the health and conversations involved in a service comprised of m...

When it comes to points of network visibility, common knowledge dictates that more is always better. And, when we’re talking about troubleshooting and identifying the point of delay, increased visibility is important. But multiple points of visibility can also lead to duplicate packets. There are times when duplicate packets help in troubleshooting, but they can also lead to incorrect analysis and forecasting. It’s critical for successful network management to understand when duplicate packets c...

My new report is live for Forrester clients - Predictions For 2014: Technology Monitoring. Normally I am a bit of a skeptic when it comes to predictions, especially in regards to technology, because while they are interesting to read they can cause confusion and unnecessary deliberation for a buyer/strategist if they are not in context. So my aim for this report was to provide some concrete advice for I&O professionals in 2014 in regards to their technology monitoring (user experience, appli...

The Internet of Things is upon us. How can enterprise network administrators brace for impact? Discussion of the Internet of Things – a world of connected objects, where your refrigerator sends you a text message when you’re low on milk and your basketball generates a quasi-scouting report when you’re done shooting hoops – has so far resonated most in the service provider space. What services can I sell to enable this? What infrastructure will I need to keep everything connected? But a similar c...

Network Analyzers are designed to watch the network, identify issues and alert administrators of problem scenarios. These features make the analyzer an excellent tool to locate network security breaches, and to help identify and isolate virus-infected systems. This article shows how using a network analyzer can enhance network security, which analyzer features are essential for this task and how an analyzer should be a part of any IT professional’s security incident response plan. Because firewa...

Learn the concepts and technologies behind effectively managing application performance, so you can identify and correct issues before they affect your business. Application Performance Monitoring Technologies There are a number of different types of tools on the market that report on application performance. They can be roughly categorized by the mechanisms the tool uses to measure performance: Synthetic transaction systems generate test transactions from one or more clients (or pseudo-clients)...

What does your network have in common with a cloud service provider? At first glance, you would probably say not much. But remove the word cloud, and you have an over-taxed network team spending several hours troubleshooting complex database, Citrix, VoIP, and Internet performance problems over a highly-distributed network. Too many problems and applications and too little time to manage them are challenges that will sound familiar to any network professional. Additionally, because it’s a cloud ...

A few years ago the only cloud game in town was the public cloud, but today private and hybrid clouds are also true contenders. In fact, private cloud implementations address a prevalent set of challenges and issues that public clouds cannot and can help speed up and smooth the way of cloud adoption. Here are five core tenets you should assess when weighing private cloud against public cloud options: 1. Ease of Use. IT’s responsibilities lie not just in the implementation of technology, but in i...

It has been clear for quite some time that the network has become the lifeblood of nearly all enterprises. This is not just true for obvious network-centric enterprises such as retail sites or content distributors, but also for enterprises that utilize distributed applications such as SAP, Oracle, or any number of other network-centric applications. Over the past few years, a number of new enterprise technologies have emerged that are critically reliant on network performance, but where this rel...

Observer® Reporting Server (ORS) serves as the center of the Network Instruments® performance management platform, and combines flow technologies, captured packets, and expert analysis to provide an overall view of network health. Obtain integrated views of application, network, and infrastructure performance critical to ensure that business processes function smoothly and IT supports organizational goals. Highlights: Manage performance across the enterprise Obtain aggregated views of network, a...

Modern enterprise applications are engineered for agility and are heavily virtualized for frequent deployment over scalable IT infrastructure environments. The benefits of virtualized public\private cloud environments include flexibility, efficiency, and agile business enablement. Multiple factors such as varying workload requirements, or ‘just-in‐time’ provisioning require an accurate and scalable muti-functional management suite to mitigate the risk of compromising the environment. Infosim’s S...