The Performance Zone

Tips to Boost Your Consumer’s Network Confidence

Submitted by Mike Valladao, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

October saw a record low in the  Consumer Confidence Index™.  According to Director Lynn Franco, “The impact of the financial crisis over the last several weeks has clearly taken a toll on consumers' confidence”.

However, there are always segments of the population that see the glass in a positive light.  Networking is one such segment.  Antidotal evidence shows that consumers’ network confidence is at an all-time high.  Networks are more robust than ever and consumers place great faith in them.  While, just a few years ago people often blamed the network, today the corporate network is seen as an area of stability.

A Taste of Our Own Medicine

Submitted by Brian Noone, Network Systems Manager for NetScout Systems

As a network manager, don’t you just hate when someone complains about network performance, but the problem disappears as soon as you start looking for it? Here at NetScout even we run into that type of issue.

One afternoon this summer, we began receiving complaints from a group of engineers that their Internet connectivity was getting slow at sporadic intervals. In order to isolate the problem, the network team logged onto nGenius Performance Manager and accessed the specific probe that was monitoring the affected network segment. The data from the probe was able to show us that there were indeed drops in network utilization appearing at regular intervals – approximately 30 seconds worth every 30 minutes – but it did not really provide us with sufficient information to isolate the root cause.

Botnets and Malware to become the Communicable Diseases of Social Networking Sites

 Submitted by Heidi Gabrielson, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

The other day, the GCN Daily Update’s subject line “Malware disguised as social networking tops new list of emerging security threats” caught my eye.  The GTISC’s Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2009 out of Georgia Tech's Information Security Center believes that malware specifically disguised as social networking links is going to be one of the top security challenges in 2009.

Your office is at home, but is your network ready?

Submitted by Eileen Haggerty, NetScout's Director of Product Marketing

I was reading Internet Telephony e-news today and the article on remote workers caught my attention:

Survey results indicate that 45 percent of U.S. workers sometimes work remotely, and at first I was surprised it wasn’t higher because everyone in my marketing and product management groups have been known to work from home if they needed to for one reason or another – illness (theirs or a child’s), contractor coming to the house, car trouble, reduction in interruptions to complete a job – you get the idea. 

But then I thought about the number of jobs that require physical presence in the office, or manufacturing plant, or retail store – after all, you can’t check out customers from home or build a car from home.  In fact, one of my colleagues from another company was infuriated last winter when one of her employees called in on a particularly bad snow day to say she was going to work from home– she was the lobby receptionist and phone operator – with a chuckle, I agreed it would be difficult to greet customers from home.

How Mature is Your Operations Process?

Submitted by Adam Reeves, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

We held a joint webinar with Riverbed recently - NetScout and Riverbed Webinar As a part of the webinar we educated the audience about the Operations Process Maturity model. It’s a model that applies NetScout’s packet-flow technology to a maturity-based process continuum for monitoring and troubleshooting IT performance. Specifically, we divide the maturity model into three incremental categories that build upon each other as follows (from least mature to most):

Google’s G1 – Here we go again…

Submitted by Brian Robertson, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

Yet another phone with content-rich mobile capabilities is about to hit the streets – With AT&T and Apple paving the way for symbiotic cell phone / carrier relationships – Google, yes, that Google, just added its Android OS to a cell phone manufactured by HTC called the “G1” that will be available only to T-Mobile subscribers as described in Yahoo News.

Let see what the G1 offers per articles in Telegraph.co.uk, InfoSync and Information Week:

You Can Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!

Submitted by Adam Reeves, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

Recently we co-hosted a webinar with our partner Riverbed. The topic was how Riverbed and NetScout work together so that our joint customers can not only take advantage of Riverbed’s WAN optimization and application acceleration, but do so without loss of visibility into network and application performance analysis.

We see customer value across several use cases of the joint solution including identifying which WAN segments, applications, and user groups require acceleration and optimization; quantifying improvements brought about by Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances via comparison between pre- and post-optimization performance; troubleshooting optimized portions of user networks; troubleshooting the Riverbed implementation itself; and providing users with uninterrupted, end-to-end visibility into network and application performance.

Phone Bill Forensics not good enough to support DHS Initiatives at the State & Local level

Submitted by Heidi Gabrielson, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

NetScout has just kicked off a program aimed at helping state and local government agencies meet the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) objectives “to help prevent or minimize the impact of terrorist activities and to aid in first responder efforts to reduce recovery time”. Of course, being in the network performance management space, the manner in which we can help is to ensure agency networks run at peak efficiency, especially during times of crisis. After all, the network plays a crucial role in achieving the DHS goals of good data sharing between agencies and quick access to emergency information.

A Better Picture is Worth a Billion Dollars

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.

Taking the Focus off of FCC Reporting, Putting it on the Customer

Submitted by Adam Reeves, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

The FCC is allowing telephone operators to stop filing yearly reports on service quality and customer satisfaction as part of their ARMIS (Automated Reporting Management Information System) filings that had been mandated in 1987. I had originally read about the issue at wsj.com (– sorry it’s pay to read the entire article) and saw that in fact, on Friday, the FCC had issued a 57 page document announcing the change (http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-08-203A1.doc).