* Case study: Retail Grocery Inventory Service
More times than not network managers are faced with multi-layer performance problems, and to address them, they need to buy many tools that can examine each facet of the performance degradation.
Take Retail Grocery Inventory Service, or RGIS. The Auburn Hills, Mich., company provides inventory services for grocers and supports about 400 offices and 40,000 employees worldwide. The number of locations requires RGIS to vary its net connectivity and run about 1,000 route paths all over the world, the company says.
“We have the challenge of taking a very large network and trying to make it simpler to administer,” says Jim Willard, network specialist with RGIS. “Specifically, we needed a way to measure bandwidth to see if lines truly needed an upgrade or if there was a different performance issue involved.”
To do this, RGIS takes a two-pronged approach. It uses Netcordia’s NetMRI device to measure performance on the network coupled with Network Physics to drill down deep to find specific performance issues. NetMRI assesses the network every 24 hours and can alert IT staff to misconfigured routers, network switches and even ports behaving badly.
“We don’t replace devices nearly as often as we did before. We can now tell if the problem is really a hardware break or if we can fix the problem by adjusting the configuration,” Willard says.
As for the use of Network Physics, of which RGIS has multiple devices deployed in various data centers, Willard says he uses that when he knows the source of a problem and needs a very detailed engineering take on it.
“Network Physics jumps up to Layer 7 and helps us resolve deeper issues,” he explains.
