Next up are dashboard capabilities and user-experience monitoring, network analyst says
At Apache, a Houston-based global energy company, 2010 has been a year of increased network visibility, says Dave Schraudt, network analyst at the Fortune 500 corporation.
With December here and 2010’s end close at hand, network managers (among other IT professionals) are naturally starting to assess their current capabilities and looking ahead to how to improve those.
At Apache, a Houston-based global energy company, this has been a year of increased network visibility, says Dave Schraudt, network analyst at the Fortune 500 corporation. That, he says, the company has gained from deploying Network Instruments’ Observer Reporting Server (ORS), a standalone appliance that aggregates and reports on data collected from network probes; NetFlow devices; Observer Infrastructure, a network monitoring tool; and other collection agents. Apache previously used Sniffer boxes but this year changed to Observer probes, he adds.
“We’re bringing NetFlow traffic and network trending data from all our international and major U.S. offices into the Observer Suite, which runs on our ORS platform. So what we’ve been working on this year is bringing all that data together and providing more visibility.”
The new setup also aids in troubleshooting, he adds. (See also: Top 5 network management investments)
As an example, Schraudt cites a recent incident in which he was able to quickly filter raw data feeds coming from four offshore platform subnets and identify from where an unusually large amount of network traffic was originating. Local IT staff in Aberdeen, Scotland, could see the traffic bump using its traditional network monitoring tool, but ORS delivered far more granular information, he says.
“We got it down to the IP addresses, and could identify a lot of HTTP and CIFS traffic going from an offshore machine to a file server in the Aberdeen office. We were able to hand that information off to the local IT people for their troubleshooting,” Schraudt explains.
Ultimately, Schraudt says, he’d like to see ORS be the dashboard for network health in general – although he’s deliberately not using that specific term since earlier such projects haven’t met with much success at Apache. “I’m not selling ORS as a dashboard, but in effect that’s what it’s going to be for the network side, with application monitoring – it’s very flexible, with the ability to report WAN link outages, application performance status and things like that.”
While Schraudt works on turning ORS into a full-fledged dashboard for Apache, he says he’s also eyeing user-experience monitoring as a project he’d like the network team to undertake going forward. “It just makes a whole lot of sense to me,” he says.
“Everything we do tool-wise or on the network is meant to enhance end-user performance. If have end user-experience monitoring, that’d basically give us the visibility into what we’re working toward,” he says.
What’s more, user-experiencing monitoring also would help move the organization from reactive to proactive mode, Schraudt adds. “That’s really our biggest pain point as far as performance management goes.”
Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can e-mail her or find her here.
