Organisations are increasingly dependent on the performance of business applications, which depend on the performance of the network. Today’s complex applications put an increasing strain on the organisation’s network and server infrastructure, writes Daryle DeBalski.

Network infrastructure is now vital in supporting business-critical applications, providing the data on which decisions are made and facilitating communications with customers, partners, suppliers and co-workers. This makes it a strategic asset to the business. Any downtime or degradation in network or application performance will directly impact on an organisation’s bottom line.

Networks are also becoming more complex, with virtualisation extending from the data centre to the desktop and a continued growth in cloud services, making visibility across the network more difficult. Performance problems may result from a proliferation of Wi-Fi devices, excessive use of bandwidth by unauthorised applications, configuration errors, poor application delivery infrastructure or many other sources. The increasing inclusion of voice and video adds more complexity and pushes bandwidth to its limits.

To keep the business running smoothly, the performance of both applications and the network must be maintained at the highest levels. The traditional approach has been to monitor network and application performance separately, using different systems run by different teams.

However, the increasing interdependency of applications and networks mean that organisations need an integrated solution if they are to identify the source of any performance problems quickly and solve them before incurring costly downtime.

How Application Aware Network Performance Management (AANPM) helps organisations understand enterprise network infrastructure
Tackling the issues facing applications and the network infrastructure they run on requires complete end-to-end visibility across all network, from the data centre to the branch office, which can be realised through Application Aware Network Performance Management (AANPM).

AANPM helps organisations optimise the performance of business critical applications while speeding up network and application troubleshooting and minimising downtime.

AANPM is a method of monitoring, analysing and troubleshooting both networks and applications. It takes an application-centric view of everything happening across the network, providing end-to-end visibility of the network and applications and the interdependencies, and enabling engineers to monitor and optimise the end user experience. It does not look at applications from a coding perspective, but in terms of how they are deployed and how they are performing.

Six reasons organisations should consider using AANPM

1. End-to-end visibility of the IT infrastructure. An AANPM solution brings together the key data points from the network monitoring system (NMS) and applications. Performance management systems provide a single dashboard view of critical applications and the underlying infrastructure. Organisations can ‘see’ what is going on in the network, who is using it, where they are connected and the path from ‘here’ to ‘there’. Reporting can be provided at a granular level, helping to monitor KPIs and track device performance and use, which is particularly useful in understanding the performance of virtualised equipment.

2. Faster problem solving. When a performance problem hits a key application, AANPM’s cross-platform visibility provides all the information needed to track down the root cause quickly, from the wireless environment and across local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) connections, through the physical and virtual network infrastructure and into all tiers of the server and application environment. Instead of debating where the problem is IT teams can work together using common tools to resolve the issue.

3. Improved user experience. Today’s applications can exist in many different places and different infrastructure tiers, making it difficult to discover the root cause when a user experiences a problem. AANMP provides a comprehensive view of all infrastructure elements and how data and messages move between them, letting organisations monitor the end user experience and identify the source of problems more quickly. By proactively examining performance, they can also identify and fix small problems before they have a significant impact on users.

4. Enhanced productivity. By finding the root cause more quickly and speeding up mean time to resolution (MTTR) an AANPM system reduces expensive downtime and improves overall quality of service. It also gives engineers more time to work on strategic projects to optimise performance and benefit the business.

5. Cost savings. A single AANPM system replaces multiple separate systems, providing significant cost savings.

6. More time and data to support infrastructure optimisation. An AANPM system can collect and correlate all types of critical performance data. As well as giving engineers the breadth and depth of visibility to find root cause more quickly, it lets them spot poor performance and identify where the paths of applications or servers are running slowly so that the slowest and most critical paths can be addressed. This can be used to prioritise and make the business case for projects such as server upgrades, verify that they have been implemented and have not reduced performance elsewhere, and prove the impact of changes such as virtualisation, WAN optimisation or data centre consolidation. The data also supports capacity planning, helping engineers identify where more bandwidth is needed.

Daryle DeBalski is the Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Network Systems business unit at Fluke Networks, a part of Danaher’s (DHR) Test and Measurement portfolio of companies.

DeBalski has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry with over half of that in senior leadership roles.

Prior to his previous roles, DeBalski was Vice President and General Manager and Vice President of Research & Development and Chief Technical Officer for Visual Network Systems. DeBalski joined Fluke Networks in 2005, serving as the Engineering Director for Network Performance Analysis, which became the VNS business. DeBalski was instrumental in Fluke Networks’ acquisitions of Visual Networks in 2005 and Crannog Software in 2007 and has led the development of the performance management product line from its inception through the breakthrough Visual Performance Manager and Application Performance Appliance solutions.

Before joining Fluke Networks, he served as a Senior R&D Manager at Agilent Technologies; Vice President of R&D at Optika, a business-to-business software company; and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Visit www.flukenetworks.com.