DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /    ( Table of Contents )

Breaking News - Networking:

NetScout Announces App Monitoring, Reporting For Enterprises

NetScout Systems Inc, a provider of enterprise-wide network and application performance management solutions, announced new application performance management support for enterprises utilizing Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) in their wide area networks. The new nGenius Site Monitoring and Reporting features, delivered as an enhancement to NetScout's nGenius Performance Management Solution, allows IT managers to view the usage and performance of business applications that may otherwise be obscured in MPLS environments.

MPLS is gaining wide popularity for its benefits in improving the performance and costs of delivering applications across the wide area network. According to Gartner, MPLS is the dominant next-generation enterprise WAN technology. "MPLS uses packet labeling that provides no visibility into application flows and activity, but enterprises have a need to detect and monitor the various types of traffic being converged over MPLS," said Neil Rickard, vice president of research for Gartner. "In addition, the QoS technology often deployed as part of MPLS services adds to the challenge of validating proper use of the different classes of service. IT managers can better plan and manage their MPLS deployments by deploying solutions that offer application-level insight."

Among NetScout's customers using the new nGenius Site Monitoring and Reporting is CSC, a provider of IT integration and outsourcing services to numerous industries, including the international airline industry. The company began a global deployment of MPLS in 2003 to approximately 350 remote sites. Approximately one-fourth of the sites are now receiving applications delivered under MPLS. Although SNMP-based network activity statistics are made available by its service provider, CSC uses NetScout's nGenius Site Monitoring and Reporting to gain application-level details that are important to regional business customers. The NetScout information provides an understanding of what applications are running over the WAN, distinguishes between anomalies and real bandwidth needs, and supports deeper troubleshooting with built-in packet analysis.

"SNMP has its limitations for application performance management," said Tore Enger, network engineer for CSC. "Prior to deploying MPLS, NetScout's nGenius Solution enabled us to define and size the types of application traffic we were seeing in the WAN. Unknown traffic was very tightly contained to just 5 percent of total volume. With this level of application tracking, bottlenecks, spikes and other events affecting responsiveness or resource needs were easily isolated for corrective action. With NetScout's new site monitoring, the impact of MPLS or many other new wide area technology on application tracking is a non-issue. Using NetScout, we are able to generate detailed reports for regional users that explain utilization and responsiveness for each type of application, site and resource requirements. In addition, we can drill seamlessly between reports and real time views to packet capture and response time, solving any problem on the fly in a matter of minutes."

The new nGenius Site Monitoring and Reporting provides:

• Complete, unified insight into the types of applications being delivered across the MPLS WAN.
• Validation of appropriate prioritization schemes, individual application flows and their respective QoS levels.
• Unified real-time network and application monitoring, flexible newspaper-style reporting and in-depth packet analysis -- all delivered seamlessly within a single solution for more effective IT planning and reduced mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) of service slowdowns.
• Physical and logical monitoring of the network and its applications for individual, grouped and total application volumes and responsiveness on the network.

"As MPLS and encrypting technologies reach critical mass in the WAN, enterprises will need to preserve their access to business relevant information in order to measure the effectiveness of these technologies," said Michael Szabados, senior vice president of product operations for NetScout Systems. "This new feature ensures that as our customers roll out their MPLS initiatives, they will be able to understand and communicate how vital applications are performing, who is using them, and what resources should be applied to them, despite the new barriers to traffic visibility."