American Heart Association keeps tabs on WAN performance

Management tool helps AHA find out about network problems before its carriers do

In addition to focusing on application performance across its internal network, the American Heart Association is leveraging its network management tools to keep its WAN vendors on their toes.

“People tend to be so worried about what they need to do on their own internal network that they forget about how their network is being transported,” Hinkle says, noting that the American Heart Association relies on a carrier-provided MPLS network (MPLS explained) to tie together 170 of its offices nationwide. “But your network is really relying on somebody else's network. It’s not truly yours. And you need to be able to manage that as well.”

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In addition to focusing on application performance across its internal network, the American Heart Association is leveraging its network management tools to keep its WAN vendors on their toes.

“People tend to be so worried about what they need to do on their own internal network that they forget about how their network is being transported,” Hinkle says, noting that the American Heart Association relies on a carrier-provided MPLS network (MPLS explained) to tie together 170 of its offices nationwide. “But your network is really relying on somebody else's network. It’s not truly yours. And you need to be able to manage that as well.”

Carriers tend to be more focused on repairing circuits that are actually down, in order to meet their SLAs, than on addressing performance issues. “If [a circuit is] just performing poorly because it’s dropping packets or having errors, that’s not necessarily down so they’re not jumping to fix it,” he says.

That’s where the organization leverages its Visual Uptime Select tool from Fluke Networks. “We use Visual Uptime to proactively monitor the MPLS circuits and notify our carriers when things aren’t going well,” he says. “We’ll tell them when they’re not meeting our performance SLAs.”

Being active can mean the difference between a full-fledged outage and a simple scheduled fix.

“If you’re not constantly measuring that performance, you don’t know there’s a problem until the circuit’s down,” he says. “But if it’s just a failing piece of hardware, we can alert the carriers before it’s a bigger problem. And it can be fixed by something like a scheduled 10 p.m. downtime when nobody’s in the office, rather a long-term surprise service outage.”

Cummings is a freelance writer in North Andover, Mass. She can be reached at jocummings@comcast.net.

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