The Performance Zone

Indexing – Finding what you need now

Submitted by Adam Reeves, Product Marketing Manager for NetScout

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.

That’s great, but what does it have to do with performance management, indexing, and MTTR?

SNMP MIBs and NetFlow and High-Definition Probes, Oh My!

We were interviewed recently for a European newspaper article and one of their questions was:

What are the most common mistakes made by employers/IT professionals when it comes to implementing effective network management systems?

Our response was:

The biggest mistake is probably sourcing and acquiring network and application management tools in a vacuum. All too often IT groups have one particular need - could be troubleshooting, and go out and select a packet analysis product.  Then another group needs a reporting package and they have to do a search for that, only to find out 8 months later when they want to use NetFlow for application visibility that the reporting tool doesn’t support it.  The result? IT organizations end up with a multitude of non-integrated tools that become cumbersome to support and use across the enterprise for unified analysis.

Under this category, I will post information about the availability of different data sources for performing network and application performance management activities, such as standard SNMP MIBs, like MIBII, ATM, and Frame Relay; NetFlow or sFlow; as well as our nGenius Probes.  I'll also comment on ways to incorporate other projects your teams are addressing today and in the coming year or two or three to build a cost-effective case for a unified management application to analyze the data sources in your network.