The Performance Zone

NetScout User Forum Highlights: Educating the Masses on Network Misuse

Certainly our annual NetScout User Forum conference in Vegas gave all attendees ample opportunity to test drive our latest products in a lab environment.  Hands-on training is in fact one of the key reasons that people attend the NUF.  But we also like to look deeper at typical problems that all attendees face.  This year, a key topic for breakout discussion was one that everyone runs into:  namely network misuse. Network misuse, as we saw it, takes many forms:  too many trips to unauthorized (non-business) web sites, overtaxed bandwidth from streaming video, internet radio, instant messaging, and just plain ignorance about the effect of some types of network traffic. 

It seems our users have had varying degrees of success convincing upper management that it is in fact a serious problem or whether management agrees on what to do about it, since you must trade off workflow for work environment.  Our panel discussion on the Seven Deadly Sins of Network Abuse noted that education is certainly key.  It's simply not enough to have a written policy on network use, or to report abusers, or even to block them: network operations must spend ample time on educating users about the effect of their behavior, and on relating to managers the true performance impact of "innocent" surfing.

And the problem is not going away.  By one related calculation, this year's experts are predicting over 50% increase in online gift buying, mostly accomplished from the office.....A few minutes on the web at lunch is no big deal, what if most of your employees had the same idea at the same time?  Awareness is key.  Read what others had to say on the personal surfing at the office subject...

Eye on the Carriers

In her latest "Eye On The Carriers" column for Network World , Johna Til Johnson explains her "immutable laws" of telco economics. In a nutshell, she says providers who deliver multiple services over the same pipe will win, as long as they invest in the customer service infrastructure that will assure those services meet or exceed customer expectations.

NetScout has been thinking along those same lines lately, and you'll see us at several service provider venues in upcoming months as a result-- including TeleManagement World in Dallas  and 3GSM in Barcelona .

Providers we've been talking to know they need to:

Improve service levels. They need early-warning capabilities and rich diagnostics so they can limit the impact of performance disruption on revenue and customer satisfaction.

Ramp up new services faster. They need scalable, carrier-grade architecture that can easily be configured to track, monitor, and report against key high-value customers and newly deployed services.

Reduce MTTR. They want a top-down approach that provides comprehensive visibility into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), traffic flows, and packets to allow operations teams to rapidly identify, pinpoint and correct problems, even before customers are impacted.

Johnson is right and providers understand: network, customer and service assurance are interdependent, and are the keys to future success.

NetScout User Forum Conference Highlights: Partners' Points of View

To place the nGenius Solution in the context of Service Management and Application Management, we invited Michael Procopio of HP and Bob Ure from Mercury Interactive to speak at NUF.

HP (fyi NetScout's integration with HP)
Michael's presentation focused on the effects of service management on the industry and IT professional such as people in the audience. According to Michael, the key task of network service management (NSM) is to ensure availability and performance of business services. Service driven operations (SDO) is transforming IT organizations from technology provider to business partner, from focusing on business stability to business agility, and from maintenance to innovation. For CIOs and service managers, SDO enables IT staff to provide their business with meaningful, current, and easy-to-understand visibility into the health and status of critical IT services. For IT operational staff, SDO provides the ability to operate the IT infrastructure more effectively and from a service-oriented perspective, and to prioritize work based on the most critical impact of IT service health to the business, increasing efficiency and producing more meaningful and measurable results.

Mercury Interactive
Bob's focus was on application performance lifecycle (APL) management. The key problems APL solves are increasing collaboration across silo'd teams; making it easier to replicate problems, testing for reality and planning for capacity; increasing confidence at "Go Live" by providing load testers visibility into production requirements; shortening time to resolution because testing adn operations utilize different tools; adn enabling more and faster test cycles to further mitigate risk. With the integration of Mercury's Business Availability Center (BAC) and NetScout's nGenius Solution, customers can be provided with a single, business-oriented console for consolidated network, server and application performance management mapped directly to their critical business services. This allows for tighter control of critical business processes, with flow-based High Definition network performance information that only NetScout can deliver, along with the correlation of infrastructure performance and end-user experience from Mercury.