I’m a messy, unorganized person (and hopefully my manager isn’t reading this). Everyone agrees (wife, family, colleagues, me). Until recently my process for keeping track of paid bills and other important papers was to put them in a carton until I either a) needed something at which point I would frantically sort through the box, (hopefully) find what I was looking for, and then pile everything back into the box or b) got motivated (more likely embarrassed) and filed them away by company or topic.
Submitted by Adam Reeves, Product Marketing Manager for NetScout
That’s great, but what does it have to do with performance management, indexing, and MTTR?
In effect I was capturing all of these documents (in the network and application performance analysis world, let’s call them packets) not unlike a continuous capture device with excellent capture performance and a large storage array (unlimited cardboard cartons). Eventually, I’d file them, but until then I would manually search through these large boxes of paper whenever I needed something. The more packets (or papers) I stored the larger the haystack got, and the more cumbersome it was to find that needle.
That may have all changed two months ago when my wife read in Real Simple magazine about filing paid bills into month of the year expandable files and then storing those files at the end of the year. Basically, they’ve come up with a way for me quickly and easily index my captured packets (papers) as they come in so that I can more quickly get the information I need when problems arise.
Now this indexing is much simpler than what we do with nGenius InfiniStream, but serves an excellent illustrative purpose. nGenius InfiniStream captures packets, indexes them for quick/easy analysis, and then stores them so they can be quickly and efficiently recalled when trouble occurs. Many alternative offerings simply capture the packets and then store them as tracefiles (not unlike my cartons). Then when a user goes searching for information indexes the packets temporarily “on the fly” and presents the information. Like with me sorting through large cartons of papers this temporary indexing is very simple (“not what I’m looking for,” versus “exactly what I’m looking for now”). At the end of the analysis, like I did with my papers, they throw all of the packets back into the carton until they’re needed again. This simple indexing must be redone with every change to the analysis or new analysis. The “on the fly” analysis slows me down when I’m looking for papers (or when network analysts are trying to identify root cause of faults). These competitors are forced to do things this way because they can’t keep up with traffic if CPUs are focused on indexing packets – in much the same way I can’t keep up with my life if I’m forever filing paid bills. As a result, they’re forced to simply store the packets in a big carton.
The result of using a network analysis solution with strong indexing to go with a massive storage array and high performance capture performance is that not only are all of the packets there when a user needs them, but the process of finding them and using them to solve problems is much simpler. A solution like nGenius InfiniStream is not only able to capture and store packets, but its indexing ultimately helps our users reduce MTTR.
You can find more information about nGenius InfiniStream at the NetScout website
The comparison between my bill filing needs and nGenius InfiniStream is a bit of a stretch, do you have one that’s better? Have you had an experience where nGenius InfiniStream helped you quickly resolve an issue? Please share them in the comments!
Comments