The Performance Zone

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.   

NetScout User Forum Conference Highlights: An Industry Expert's Prediction

At this year's NUF, we invited Jean-Pierre Garbani, Vice President at Forrester Research, to deliver a speech titled IT Operations: the Next Five Years.

I agree with him that service delivery is the next IT battle ground and competition is no longer a matter of technology but a matter of service availability and performance. Actually, that is what I see in the market place particularly in the service providers' space where I have been spending a lot of my time lately. If the ultimate goal is customer assurance, you really need to assure services and in order to assure services, your network availability and performance must be assured first.

The key takeaways from Mr. Garbani's presentation are: IT operations' evolution driver is going to be economics; simplification of infrastructures and automation will be the dominant themes of the next five years; vendors will have to adapt from a data collection-reporting model which takes advantage of diversity to a new model that promotes analytics and automation; and IT organizations will reduce the amount of manual tasks and align on management processes. I am pleased that our product roadmap is quite in sync with this industry trend, since we have been improving our nGenius Solution in the direction of more analytics, more automation, and more enhancement of network and application performance to assure business services. 

Firefighting for Performance Monitoring, No More

I promised you a full report on highlights from this year's NetScout User Forum conference, and there's certainly a lot of good things to pass on.

For example, I was encouraged to find our users in full throttle "nGenius troubleshooting mode" as part of their daily monitoring routine.  We host an interactive Town Meeting session where the audience is polled on key questions that we (and they) ought to know about.  The results are provided instantly.  When asked how users approach their daily troubleshooting role, they had 6 options to choose from:  firefighting most of the time, a mix of troubleshooting and regular monitoring, mostly regular monitoring, purely capacity planning, watching for potential problems, or proactive superhero.

By a comfortably wide margin, for 52% of the respondents the answer is a mix of firefighting and regular monitoring.  Another 13% rely primarily on regular monitoring, and another 13% think of themselves as proactive superheroes.

In essence, there's less than 10% out there that still are caught up in full firefighting mode.  So practically speaking, our users have adapted and are constantly trying to keep ahead of the curve, through proactive monitoring, detailed and spot data and trend analysis, and consumer education through data sharing.  We like to think that the nGenius System helps on all of these fronts, and the numbers here bear this out.       

Conquering the Chaos and Assure Optimal Performance

I just returned from Las Vegas where NetScout held it's annual user conference. For those of you who could not make it, don't worry!! I will be posting the highlights over the next few posts to get you up to date :)

This is a very exciting time for NetScout to have held this event with the theme of Conquering the Chaos: Real Performance in a Virtualized World. A few months ago, we introduced our Application Fabric Performance Management Architecture to address the challenges of network and application performance management in an increasingly virtualized wolrd. Since then, virtualization is getting "hotter than hot," as Beth Schultz from Network World puts it in her article "All Things Virtual."  Gartner believes that virtualization is the single most strategic technology in data centers today. In this virtualized world, application and service delivery infrastructures are evolving towards abstracted, loosely coupled architecture that increase the uncertainties and complexities facing the IT staff. At our user conference, we shared with our customers how we can partner together to meet the challenges and assure optimal performance of the application fabric--the interconnected virtualized resources implemented on the physical infrastructure. 

Highlights of the show are coming your way soon!

Closing out the show and a fiscal year

It has been a busy week here at Interop and I have enjoyed talking with so many different networking professionals!  Clearly, the message of the show was infrastructure change to adapt to the growing complexity of applications throughout the network.  Web based, n-tier, and SOA applications that deliver business services to end users is definitely going to change the way IT organizations manage performance across the network and application fabric. 

Many folks have stopped by our booth (#2249), test driven our nGenius Performance Manager and our new nGenius Analytics, and it is great to hear their enthusiastic feedback.  If you missed the show, be sure to come to www.netscout.com to learn more about our direction.

I also took a moment to reflect on our last year.  When we announced our strategy yesterday for AFPM and demonstrated how we are going to help IT organizations really effect a change in their current MTTR for problems that affect end users in their networks, it was the culmination of a major R&D effort for NetScout over this past year.  And it will be exciting to play a part in these next 12 months delivering technology that automates alarm and threshold setting, that automatically identifies and diagnoses performance problems, and that helps you implement corrective actions before your users are impacted by degradations.

Well, off to catch another plane – it will also be good to be sleeping in my own bed soon, too!  Hard to get much sleep here in Las Vegas – but that's all I will say – because as you know – “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!”

nGenius Analytics announced at Interop Vegas

Yesterday was a lot of fun!  It has been a while since we had a booth at Interop as the show lost its focus over the years. The show is much more focused on networking! It was refreshing to see the number of high quality folks visitiing our booth and not just looking to get a t-shirt :)

Today we announced: our new nGenius Analytics products; a customer, CN Railways, who has been a pilot user of it; and our direction for Application Fabric Performance Management (AFPM).  Please be sure to come by our booth (#2249) at Interop in Las Vegas to hear more about all these initiatives. 

NetScout unveils new look at Interop Vegas

Interop – Day 1 – NetScout introduces a New Look!!

Please be sure to come by our booth (#2249) today at Interop in Las Vegas. We are proud to unveil our new look and company logo! It is sure to be eye catching!

While you are there, stop long enough to learn how to overcome the challenges to monitoring MPLS networks. I will be there today as well so stop in an say hello!!

Stay tuned for moe info on Interop Vegas!

p.s.
NetScout will also unveil it's new web site tomorrow @ 8:30 EST, so check it out at @ www.netscout.com.