From the Eyes of the End User, Gain Insight Into Application Performance on the Network — Enterprise-Wide
As network technologies – devices, protocols, architectures, services, etc. – have matured, they have become increasingly stable, and network availability is no longer the dominant concern it once was. Interest has shifted to service levels delivered by the network infrastructure, resulting in a corresponding shift in management focus from availability and event management to application performance management.
Similarly, network monitoring and analysis tools have evolved into very capable commodities, delivering the foundation of a network management infrastructure. Network management consoles offer network topology mapping/visualization, and polling/trap mechanisms can provide a real-time view of the health of the network components. Increasingly coupled with traffic flow information from probes or NetFlow records, these network management solutions often seem to suggest that monitoring the health of the network is sufficient to understand application service levels, to measure how the network contributes to end-user response time. But while performance and usage metrics from the routers, switches, links and load balancers that support these business systems are certainly important and helpful, they don’t reliably inform you about application service levels.
Most organizations do know when their network is up or down, but they don’t always know what is happening on it in terms of load, distribution, route and, ultimately, application performance. Unlike traditional system and network management, Gomez Network Performance Management focuses on that gray area between network up and network down, for all applications on the wire.
Effective network application performance management demands a level of understanding of application behavior and application network performance across local and distributed locations. Gomez Network Performance Monitoring passively captures network traffic providing key supporting data for dependent, and associated non-dependent traffic, assisting in the overall APM process, by proactively identifying hot spots, performance bottlenecks and networked application conditions.
Without visibility into how different applications impact the network, organizations will find it tough to deliver on business expectations. With Gomez Network Performance Monitoring, IT operations has the ability to:
- capture real-time visibility into network performance issues to quickly determine who, where and what is impacting the network
- baseline and perform trend analysis of network performance to detect anomalies prior to users complaining
- optimize application performance across the network to reduce risk of downtime and proactively identify performance impacts.
