The Performance Zone

NetScout User Forum Conference Highlights: An Industry Expert's Prediction

At this year's NUF, we invited Jean-Pierre Garbani, Vice President at Forrester Research, to deliver a speech titled IT Operations: the Next Five Years.

I agree with him that service delivery is the next IT battle ground and competition is no longer a matter of technology but a matter of service availability and performance. Actually, that is what I see in the market place particularly in the service providers' space where I have been spending a lot of my time lately. If the ultimate goal is customer assurance, you really need to assure services and in order to assure services, your network availability and performance must be assured first.

The key takeaways from Mr. Garbani's presentation are: IT operations' evolution driver is going to be economics; simplification of infrastructures and automation will be the dominant themes of the next five years; vendors will have to adapt from a data collection-reporting model which takes advantage of diversity to a new model that promotes analytics and automation; and IT organizations will reduce the amount of manual tasks and align on management processes. I am pleased that our product roadmap is quite in sync with this industry trend, since we have been improving our nGenius Solution in the direction of more analytics, more automation, and more enhancement of network and application performance to assure business services. 

Firefighting for Performance Monitoring, No More

I promised you a full report on highlights from this year's NetScout User Forum conference, and there's certainly a lot of good things to pass on.

For example, I was encouraged to find our users in full throttle "nGenius troubleshooting mode" as part of their daily monitoring routine.  We host an interactive Town Meeting session where the audience is polled on key questions that we (and they) ought to know about.  The results are provided instantly.  When asked how users approach their daily troubleshooting role, they had 6 options to choose from:  firefighting most of the time, a mix of troubleshooting and regular monitoring, mostly regular monitoring, purely capacity planning, watching for potential problems, or proactive superhero.

By a comfortably wide margin, for 52% of the respondents the answer is a mix of firefighting and regular monitoring.  Another 13% rely primarily on regular monitoring, and another 13% think of themselves as proactive superheroes.

In essence, there's less than 10% out there that still are caught up in full firefighting mode.  So practically speaking, our users have adapted and are constantly trying to keep ahead of the curve, through proactive monitoring, detailed and spot data and trend analysis, and consumer education through data sharing.  We like to think that the nGenius System helps on all of these fronts, and the numbers here bear this out.       

Conquering the Chaos and Assure Optimal Performance

I just returned from Las Vegas where NetScout held it's annual user conference. For those of you who could not make it, don't worry!! I will be posting the highlights over the next few posts to get you up to date :)

This is a very exciting time for NetScout to have held this event with the theme of Conquering the Chaos: Real Performance in a Virtualized World. A few months ago, we introduced our Application Fabric Performance Management Architecture to address the challenges of network and application performance management in an increasingly virtualized wolrd. Since then, virtualization is getting "hotter than hot," as Beth Schultz from Network World puts it in her article "All Things Virtual."  Gartner believes that virtualization is the single most strategic technology in data centers today. In this virtualized world, application and service delivery infrastructures are evolving towards abstracted, loosely coupled architecture that increase the uncertainties and complexities facing the IT staff. At our user conference, we shared with our customers how we can partner together to meet the challenges and assure optimal performance of the application fabric--the interconnected virtualized resources implemented on the physical infrastructure. 

Highlights of the show are coming your way soon!