Complete survey results Masters of management Cutting through the hype surrounding network management buzzwords. Network World, 9/29/97. We've got trouble Annual Network World management survey. 4/14/97. Paschke is a principal consultant and Kaplan is director of strategic marketing at International Network Services, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based network services company. They can be reached at jeff_paschke @ins.com and jeff_kaplan@ ins.com.

By Jeff Paschke and Jeff Kaplan
Network World, 11/10/97

1995, International Network Services (INS) conducted an industry survey that confirmed the difficulties users were having optimizing the performance of their enterprise networks. At the time, many of these problems stemmed from the lack of tools to monitor and measure the day-to-day network performance Today, despite the introduction of myriad new products and tools to address this issue, INS latest research shows many users continue to struggle to adequately manage network performance.

Network performance management has become increasingly important as users expand their networks to handle intranets/extranets, electronic commerce and other new business applications. This continual expansion and day-to-day firefighting have left net administrators with little time to proactively manage network performance. And INS' research ironically has found that the wealth of new products and tools only has compounded these issues.

These products typically require one or more dedicated people to custom configure, install and maintain them on an ongoing basis. At a time when network organizations are expected to do more with less, dedicating personnel to network performance management is a luxury. Furthermore, 40% of survey respondents report they are dissatisfied with their network performance management capabilities.

Real network performance management should accomplish three main objectives. First, it should improve service to end users and customers. Effective performance management helps you to proactively identify and reduce network resource bottlenecks and optimize net performance, thereby increasing the quality of service provided to end users and customers. Unfortunately, 53% of survey respondents indicate they are dissatisfied with their current ability to establish and maintain network performance service-level agreements (SLA). Less than 25% have SLAs in place.

Second, net performance management should improve capacity planning. Understanding historical network utilization and availability trends helps you anticipate new network infrastructure requirements. Yet only half of the survey respondents report they are performing WAN capacity planning, 46% are doing LAN capacity planning, and only a third are performing server capacity planning.

Finally, network performance management should maximize productivity and minimize costs. It should generate the data necessary to help you identify key problem areas and make the right staffing assignments so the network support staff can respond more quickly and work more effectively.

More than 40% of the survey respondents indicate they have three or more people dedicated to network performance management. In light of many users' high level of dissatisfaction with their network performance management capabilities, it is doubtful they are seeing meaningful productivity improvements.

INS' survey results make it easy to see why nearly half of the participants report that justifying the costs and benefits of network performance management technology to senior management remains their biggest obstacle to improving network performance. As one respondent put it, 'It is hard to make people understand the impact that good network management can have.'

This research demonstrates that vendors must go further to fill the functional gaps in their network performance management products.

More importantly, vendors also should provide real-world expertise to help users match their technical requirements with their business needs and then deploy the technology to optimize the performance of their enterprise networks.