The Performance Zone

NetScout's Own Eileen Haggerty is a Guest Blogger on Xchange

Submitted by Brian Robertson, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

Recently Eileen Haggerty was invited as a guest blogger on www.xchangemag.com due to her recent post here on www.netscoutblog.com titled "Is the 3G iPhone still what's hot?".

This particular contribution expands on the impact of 3G technology in terms of new ways in which it is opening the doors to disseminate information and what can happen if the proper tools aren't in place to ensure reliability.

With examples of authenticating servers not being able to activate new iPhone accounts, and the new ways that presidential hopefuls are campaigning you don't want to miss the posting, find it here on xchangemag.com.

Web 2.0 encouraging communication service providers to be more open with us.

Submitted by Adam Reeves, NetScout Product Marketing Manager

I was writing a while back about how the success of femtocells may drive new applications and business models for mobile service providers (LINK TO PREVIOUS ENTRY). It reminded me of another webinar I watched a while back on web 2.0 and its impact on the service provider community. The webinar was presented by Lightreading (www.lightreading.com) can be found here – (you will need to register to watch the webinar).

I came away from the webinar believing that as the information economy becomes more open, that communication service providers (CSPs) are going to have to a) continue opening up their networks, enabling services, and even customer-facing services to 3^rd parties that are creating new applications, b) use this openeness and access to generate new revenue (even using new revenue models), and c) since they’ll be generating revenues on the applications be able to guarantee the performance of their services and their underlying components.

An Overview of nGenius K2

Now that nGenius K2 is available to the world, we got a chance to sit down with Heidi Gabrielson, Product Marketing Manager for nGenius K2 and many other NetScout products.

In this interview, Heidi gives us an overview of nGenius K2, some stories of what K2 was able to discover during the beta process on live customer networks, and the story of how “K2” became the name of NetScout’s latest product.

Direct MP3 download:
Download 2008-05-08-Heidi_Gabrielson-K2_Overview-v2.mp3 (6,249 KB)

Visit the K2 Product Page to learn more!

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.

Flow to Packet: Network Performance Management from A Service Provider's Perspective

With increasingly converged and complex networked services, service providers are under a lot of pressure to deliver quality service and customer assurance. Key service enablers are playing ever more crucial roles and need to provide quick response for a good customer experience with the service. AAA servers, need to authenticate cell phone users each time the phone is turned on,  DHCP servers need to dynamically assign IP addresses, DNS servers need to perform name to IP address translation. Any one of these service enablers being a weak link will negatively impact the service they are meant to serve.

Since there is no room for guesswork here, service providers place instrumentation in front of key service enablers such AAA , DNS, and DHCP servers as well as the application servers hosting the  service (such as WAP - mobile WEB service on a cell phone). The instrumentation provides real-time end-to-end visibility into services delivered, the customers using them, and the network infrastructure delivering them.

With insight into critical KPIs and proactive automated problem detection and diagnostics, service providers can significantly reduce MTTR. Without such assurance, services could go south in a hurry. In other words, deeper service visibility delivers higher service quality control. This ability to see the whole picture on the flow-level and at the same time dive deep into targeted packet analysis whenever needed allows service providers to assure services and increase customer satisfaction.

"Flow to packet" vs "Find the needle in the haystack"

In an earlier entry, I discussed the importance of using a top-down approach to network and application performance management in order to reduce MTTR. I promised to pick up this theme again and here I am. On one hand, you want to have visibility into the flows instead of looking at all packets if you want to reduce MTTR. On the other hand, you need the capability of diving deeper into the packet data whenever necessary to pinpoint and fix performance problems. In other words, you need a solution that allows you to combine comprehensive real-time and historical monitoring with continuous packet recording and detailed packet level data mining. I will share with you a few customer stories in some key vertical markets in upcoming posts.

Service Assurance, IMS, and Network Performance

It used to be that DSL was the most popular three-letter acronym in the telecom universe. No more... that title now belongs to IMS, or IP Multimedia Subsystem.

IMS is a global, access-independent and standard-based IP connectivity and service control architecture that enables various types of multimedia services to end users using common Internet- based protocols.

This definition comes from a book I highly recommend for those wanting to techniclly dive deeper into IMS.  "The IMS IP Multimedia Concepts and Services (Second Edition) by Mikka Poikselka, Georg Mayer, Hisham Khartabil and Aki Niemi (Wiley Publishing).

The goal of IMS is to drive revenue by delivering converged, multimedia services and reducing costs through a converged, IP based network architecture. 

Big service providers such as Cingular, BellSouth and AT&T are all rolling out IMS-based networks and ABI Research expects service providers to invest $10.1 billion in IMS during the next five years, which will drive $49.6 billion in service revenue from IMS-enabled applications in 2011. I listened to Cingular's 'director of network transformation' deliver a great presentation at the last IMS Summit in February that drove home how much of a reality IMS is becoming. These types of investments in IMS are in fact happening globally around the world.

The IMS standards continue to evolve and it is undeniable that carriers are moving rapidly from a circuit world to a packet world using IP in their core. Broadband speed is now extended to the edge. Using wireless broadband services, customers can use their handset devices to play interactive games and access streaming content and do instant multimedia messaging among other services.

All these services have added more complexity to the network and more stress on the core and access layers. In order to attract and retain customers, carriers need a comprehensive network performance management solution to gain visibility into the entire network, particularly the core and links at regional and national data centers to have network and in turn service assurance. Such assurance is essential to their bottom-line—customer satisfaction and incremental revenue.

Taming the Wild Corporate Video

Of course, we don't really need industry experts to remind us that video on the corporate web is red-hot, pervasive, and dangerous.  You can't review the news these days without seeing filler stories on YouTube and Google video alongside the critical news on wars and terrorism. Video sites are all the rage for creating user-created content on an unprecedented scale, which means millions of users are viewing it, too.  If your company has yet to come to grips with a personal viewing and download policy, it might be time to do so. Before, we were focused on whether it was appropriate, legal, and how much impact it had on network bandwidth. Hopefully, these inappropriate, unwelcome downloads were the exception rather than the rule.

But how much time can you really devote to this type of monitoring without bringing your entire operation to its knees? You now need to regularly monitor for exceptions, rather than waiting for a crisis to erupt. NetScout provides visibility into how much this is occuring, when it is ocurring, and with whom.

I say, be informed to be forwarned.  Network Computing takes a look at the five most popular video sites: AOL, Blip.tv, Google Video, Yahoo Video and YouTube.

AFPM Explained (Video)

NetScout has recently announced it's Application Fabric Performance Management (AFPM) strategy.

Here is a pointer to a short AFPM Explained video clip that you may find helpful.

Innovating in Performance Management

NetScout just announced we'd been granted a new patent.  The patent, which was for a new method of anomaly detection based on statistical analysis, was the result of work by a couple of guys from Quantiva, which NetScout bought in 2005 and a mathematics/statistics consultant from Princeton.

The patented technology forms one of the key elements of the nGenius Analytics product that NetScout launched in May and is interesting because of how it improves on previous methods of doing anomaly detection for performance management in IT (as opposed to security applications, which can also use anomaly detection). Notably, using a probability distribution mapping scheme, the system is able to get a much richer picture of whether a change or trend in performance measurements is truly an anomaly, as opposed to other methods that use rolling averages or deviation-from-norm analysis which are generally more simplistic schemes.

Another interesting aspect of this patent, and part of the reason we bought Quantiva frankly, was the flexibility of patented statistical model. It doesn't make any assumptions about the data set it is analyzing (i.e. it isn't tied to Gaussian or Poisson models), which makes it inherently more useful for a variety of applications, including analyzing unpredictable network traffic. For instance, Quantiva was using the patented model for anomaly detection for a Web site performance measurement service based on response time. It could just as easily be used to detect anomalies in a stream of securities trading prices (if we ever wanted to get into that business…). Most importantly though, this flexibility will allow NetScout to apply it to potentially endless streams of network, application and other performance data, not just bandwidth usage or usage by application and response times.