Submitted by Adam Reeves, NetScout Product Marketing Manager
We’ve all heard the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” In the case of United Airlines investors earlier this month it could have been, “a better picture is worth a billion dollars.”
On Sept 8, United Airlines stock temporarily lost more than 75% of its value as it dropped from around $12/share to around $3 after an article on its 2002 bankruptcy was distributed as new news after a mistake made by some combination of Google, the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper, Income Security Advisors, and Bloomberg. The event has been widely reported, but in case you haven’t read about it here’s a New York Times article - Ultimately, the stock rebounded and ended the day having regained a large portion of its loss.
The quick summary first and then a look at how it relates to the value of “a better picture.”
According to articles I’ve read, on Sunday Sept. 7 apparently a single reader at the Sun Sentinel website read the article (originally posted by the Chicago Tribune in 2002). This one view, caused the article (which didn’t have a dateline) to be posted to a “Most Viewed” section on the newspaper’s website. Google (www. google.com) indexed the article as a new news article. On Monday Sept. 8 an employee at Income Security Advisors forwarded it on via Bloomberg, and Bloomberg picked up and distributed the story. From there automated trading systems automatically read the information, interpreted the effect it would have on the stock, and acted by selling shares and driving the share price down until trading was halted.
No doubt this is a tragic story, but why am I discussing it on NetScout’s Performance Zone blog? Basically I’m interested in how the quality and quantity of information can affect the actions we take. This is true of the stock market as well as your network environment . The decision to dump the United stock was made on a single, poor piece of information rather than looking at the much larger universe of information available. As a result, poor decisions were made. This scenario of acting on bad information can quickly raise its head when managing networks and applications too. Acting on a single piece of bad information can slow the performance improvement process, increase MTTR in reactive troubleshooting situations, and even be the cause of a new problem where previously there hadn’t been one.
NetScout is doing several things to make sure that our customers have access to the best and most information available so that users can continuously improve network and application performance and reduce MTTR. I’d started out thinking there were only a couple of items required to describe how our offering helps users overcome these problems, but then the more I looked at the topic the more it became obvious that NetScout is doing a lot in this area:
- Correlated and holistic views of application and network performance. NetScout provides a holistic view of network and application performance so that one isn’t looking only at a single aspect of performance. For example, NetScout doesn’t force its users to look at VoIP in a vacuum. Instead we present VoIP performance metrics alongside all other applications and network performance metrics so that users can understand how VoIP is impacting the rest of their IT infrastructure and, conversely, how the rest of their applications are impacting VoIP performance.
- Enterprise-wide views. We don’t restrict users to looking at a single network segment or a single probe. Instead, via nGenius® Performance Manager and nGenius K2 we make it easy for users to gain a high-level, enterprise-wide view, and allow users to drill in to as granular a level as they require. We help users not only see the trees but the forest that they compose.
- Collaboration. By presenting collaborative workspaces and reporting tools we make it easy for teams to work together and help members solicit each other’s feedback.
- Best commercially available decodes. NetScout invests a lot in the development of packet decodes that are important to our customers. This way they know they are getting the best understanding of each packet that traverses their network.
- Packet capture performance. By investing in the performance of our nGenius InfiniStream™ offerings, we make sure that our customers have access to all of the packets traversing their networks and aren’t forced to make decisions based on fragmented or incomplete information.
- Back-in-time analysis. By providing our customers with packet capture solutions with multi-terabytes for packet storage, our users have access to packets from the windows of time they require to better understand network and application performance. By having access to multiple terabytes of packet data, users aren’t restricted to looking at data from a single point in time which can drive very different findings.
- Data granularity. Related to both packet capture performance and back-in-time analysis by providing our users with High Definition Performance Management, we’re making sure that users aren’t missing things that happen between data points.
- Data mining tools. With all of the information that we provide to our users, it’s very important that they have a quick way to get to needed packets and information. As a result we provide them not only with nGenius Performance Manager and it’s easy-to-use and understand point-and-click data mining, but we also provide the Sniffer Intelligence product set to help them mine large stores of data quickly to help solve their hardest problems.
Anyway, just having fun comparing what we do for a living to what’s going on in the rest of the world. Do you have other comparisons between network and application performance analysis and real-world events? Pass them along in the comments.
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