Bringing flow-based views into remote performance management
As discussed a few weeks back, enterprise IT interest in flow-based management is on the upswing, set in motion by cloud computing, mobility, VoIP and other forces making an end-to-end view of what’s happening across a network so crucial.
“More and more often users are at remote sites and the services are somewhere else. Therefore, performance from the desktop to the service delivery point is critical, especially when we think about services like VoIP, unified communications, IP storage and virtual desktop delivery,” says Jim Melvin, CEO of Apparent Networks.
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Too often, network engineers can’t get the view they need to assess problem performance. “They run into situations where, gee, everything seems like it’s working all right out there, but the bandwidth is saturated. They’re left wondering what’s going on, where all the bandwidth is going, asking themselves, ‘Is everyone on YouTube today or what?'” Melvin says.
To address such issues, Apparent now offers an add-on flow analysis module for PathView Cloud, a cloud-based remote performance management service that uses zero administration micro appliances to gather date at remote sites. With PathView Cloud, combined with the new FlowView capability, network engineers get flow analysis, packet capture and end-to-end IP network performance monitoring — as Melvin says, “a complete picture of what’s happening from a traffic consumption perspective.”
With FlowView’s availability, Apparent has completed its Layer 3 network analysis tool kit, Melvin says. Now it’s moving up the stack, to the application layer, he adds.
On tap for second-quarter delivery, for example, is a module aimed at easing the pain of tracking quality-of-service (QoS) problems across multicarrier end-to-end connections, Melvin says. “We’ve got the ability to monitor QoS today, but this module will exploit those capabilities further.”
