Concord advances state of service-level management with Cisco ping support

By John Morency
Network World on Network/Systems Management, 9/23/98

If you follow the state of network service-level management, you are well aware that service-level metrics supporting performance guarantees are the exception rather than the rule. In general, performance metrics support guaranteed endstation capacity, guaranteed packet latency or guaranteed end-to-end response time.

Three key factors account for the current lack of performance-centric service levels. First, product support for network performance service-level management has been generally lacking, although this is beginning to change for the better. Second, most network managers need to ensure that the required levels of underlying network availability are in place before quoting deterministic throughput or response time guarantees. Lastly, most available products do not easily lend themselves to baselining network capacity or response time from the perspective of the desktop client. Unfortunately, this is what's required to determine the performance targets that should be established.

A recent joint announcement from Concord Communications and Cisco Systems might improve this. Under the terms of the agreement, Concord's NetworkHealth product will now use "ping" technology found in Cisco routers to provide a more accurate sampling of desktop-to-server latency; it will do this by supporting the capability within NetworkHealth to initiate ICMP pings from any Cisco source router to any destination IP address. The result is that network managers can now obtain a reasonably accurate baseline of the round-trip time between a specific desktop client and destination server pair. What this approach doesn't do is capture that portion of the round-trip delay that is attributable to the latency between the desktop client and its designated router, as well as the portion that is consumed by system and application latency within the server.

While no specific product availability was included in the announcement, users can likely expect product support by the end of the first quarter of 1999. The result should be a welcome set of proactive support for NetworkHealth users who have previously been accustomed to the reporting of network availability and circuit utilization after the fact - at least for those users who have a large set of installed Cisco routers.

Reference concord.com for related joint agreement announcement information from Concord and cisco.com for agreement information from Cisco.