Management vendors are ready to step up at Interop (all the headlines from the show) to address customer demands for more proactive management of critical network services, and give network teams tools to better assess application performance.

Companies such as Apparent Networks and NetScout are among the network management vendors that plan to make announcements at the show, and specifically, that have included application-centric features in their products to help customers better manage critical business services. While monitoring network performance remains the primary concern, many network managers also need to understand how applications use a network and how the services it delivers perform on user machines.

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"Application-centric networking is a big area of concentration at Interop this year," says George Hamilton, director of enterprise computing and networking at the Yankee Group. "The more enterprise companies get into voice and wireless, the more they need application-aware management tools. And there are some elegant solutions, like Apparent Networks, that can help customers get a picture of what's on their network and take accurate performance measurements."

Apparent Networks plans to make available software called AppCritical, which costs about $100,000. The company took the technology of its AppareNet flagship offering — typically used to test networks for application deployment, troubleshoot problems and optimize configurations — and added a real-time monitoring element. Instead of running at scheduled times, AppCritical sends packets every few minutes across a network and analyzes returning data to determine network latency, application response times and jitter, for instance. It includes software installed on a dedicated server as well as distributed bits of software — what Apparent calls sequencers — installed on a few key servers in data centers.

"What is really interesting is that it can provide proactive monitoring and lets us know of a potential problem before we hear about it from a client," says Jimmy Brown, vice president of network services at Affiliated Computer Services, in Dallas. Brown intends to deploy AppCritical this summer to support 115 client networks.