Network Monitoring

IT managers need to support optimal application performance, quickly resolve problems, and plan to avoid future service degradation. NetworkVantage is a passive monitoring solution that delivers enterprise-wide metrics on application performance and network resource consumption. It gathers traffic flow information for more than 2000 applications and protocols, ranging from enterprise applications and environments such as MS/Exchange, SAP R/3, Oracle and Citrix, to peer-to-peer applications such as KaZaA and eDonkey, to protocols such as HTTP(S), SIP, FTP, L2TP and GPRS. Click here for sample application decodes.

Know where your IT dollars are going

Knowing which users are consuming bandwidth, coupled with the dimension of which applications the users are executing, helps management better understand what proportion of traffic is being used to support business-critical activities. Equally important is the ability to uncover the non-critical applications (and their users) that are stealing bandwidth from business-critical objectives.

Vantage monitors your application and network traffic 24x7 to answer these important questions:

Who (the client or server) is sending what data across the network?
What applications are competing for resources?
When was a specific application used?
Where does less critical or unwanted traffic originate?
Why is the application performing poorly?
How much data (bytes) is transmitted? 
How fast are network and server response times for an application?

Troubleshoot application performance end-to-end

Vantage provides valuable details about network traffic for business-critical applications, identifying potential problems by distinguishing between bandwidth contention, latency and client or server response-time problems. This information helps identify the source of the problem quickly, whether it resides with the client, server, application or the network—providing quantifiable proof that the network isn't always to blame when something goes wrong.

End-to-end troubleshooting

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If there is a performance bottleneck on the front-end of the network, Vantage helps you understand what applications are competing for bandwidth, which helps determine if the problem is due to congestion on the network. If the problem resides on the back-end of the network, Vantage helps identify where the transaction delay exists.  Since most core networks that house servers are high-speed and low latency, it's logical to turn your attention to server response times at the network level.  Once you isolate which server is responsible for the delay--web, application or database-- you can use ServerVantage to look at key server metrics and effectively troubleshoot the problem. 

Respond to network security breaches faster

Unauthorized network access can have dire business impact, ranging from minor application performance problems to theft of corporate data assets.  Vantage helps tackle network security breaches and complements intrusion detection products on a 24x7 basis, first by alerting users to unauthorized application traffic, and then by providing key information about:

• who accessed the network and when
• what servers they were talking to
• what applications were used
• how much data was moved.

Application Profile

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Viruses that impact network performance often have a simple network signature, such as a TCP or UDP port number. Network administrators can easily turn this signature into a Vantage application, and then report on which workstations are using that "application" to identify where security patches should be deployed first. Reports of workstations with a high number of conversation counts provide another way to detect infected stations and are also useful for identifying the presence of a previously undetected virus.

Station Activity

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Use performance alerts to maximize IT service

Vantage Probes provide alerts that identify degradation in network and application performance.  These include session-level response time, traffic volume for a specified application, jitter (for streaming applications), and network link utilization.

In addition to performance alerts, Probe Health Alarms inform the user when a Probe experiences an operational problem, such as availability or performance degradation.  These alarms assure that Vantage is kept at peak reliability. 

Manage the WAN asset

WAN is a precious network resource that must be monitored and measured to verify service provider's SLAs.  Without Vantage, users have to rely on WAN service providers to report utilization information, but they are unable to validate the data or see a breakout by application.  Vantage's application detail lets users validate the service provider's data, see which applications use excessive bandwidth, identify any that shouldn't use the WAN, and verify that the WAN link is sized correctly. Vantage details all applications running over the WAN, bandwidth utilization by application, and throughput by application, latency and availability.

Prioritize business-critical activity

To provide better and more predictable network service, Vantage offers two Quality of Service (QoS) reports that help IT managers prioritize business-critical activity. The first report helps you understand if bandwidth allocation is accurate with respect to traffic volumes and link usage. The second report gives details about which links are most crucial to key business applications.

Account for network resource utilization

Many enterprises find that traffic flow statistics provide an excellent basis for assessing infrastructure costs. Vantage offers simple billing reports based upon network usage, either by application or location. For more sophisticated needs, integration to third-party chargeback and billing systems is possible.

Chargeback report

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Ensure server consolidation success

With thousands of servers in place, IT is challenged to identify which servers are candidates for consolidation. Vantage continually monitors network cores to identify which servers are underutilized from the standpoint of user access and data throughput.

Improve VoIP performance

Vantage allows you to monitor, troubleshoot and trend VoIP performance like any other application on your network. Reports provide voice quality measures such as mean opinion score (MOS), delay, jitter and lost packets. It also provides visibility into how other traffic-such as peer-to-peer, instant messaging and web browsing-affects VoIP performance. This unique overall perspective provides a better understanding of the factors that impact VoIP quality so you can quickly pinpoint and resolve problems.

Get an integrated view of performance

Different areas of IT need to view network data in different ways. Vantage correlates and presents network and application performance data through its Interactive Viewer. This interface allows network administrators to identify performance problems rapidly and drill down to the details necessary for troubleshooting. Users can create multiple custom views of the data organized by application, client or server to permit efficient analysis of the information. When VantageView, the integrated Vantage web interface that provides business- and service-level views is used with Vantage data, users can create ad hoc VantageView reports for shorter troubleshooting time frames or look at longer-term data (weeks or months) for trending purposes. Reports can also be published outside of VantageView for inclusion in other web sites.

When troubleshooting performance problems, network engineers want to know how today differs from yesterday. To this end, the Interactive Viewer compares the session-level response times and traffic volumes of user-selected applications to known acceptable baselines.

Ensure application production readiness

Prior to application deployment, Vantage helps IT professionals avoid costly mistakes and reduce the risk of application and network failure when moving applications into production. Using the tool to measure application performance during a well-staged load test provides a basis on which to assess the impact the application has on network performance, and the network's ability to support production loads without constraining other applications.

Understand network utilization

For trending purposes Vantage reports application utilization on network links over periods of time.  Vantage also reports utilization for probed WAN and LAN links to identify times of peak network congestion. To aid with management of costly WAN links, virtual circuit utilization is reported in context of CIR or PCR, and can show the utilization as seen by both ends of the circuit. Then, to help pinpoint the cause of bottlenecks, WAN utilization may be filtered to any single application.

Expand network visibility and troubleshooting

Vantage expands its reach in monitoring and troubleshooting networks with the addition of the NetworkVantage Flow Collector. The Flow Collector receives Cisco NetFlow data to enable troubleshooting and monitoring of network performance in locations where it is not practical for a NetworkVantage probe. For organizations using an MPLS network, the Flow collector complements NetworkVantage probes by collecting Cisco NetFlow statistics from all remote locations, thus gathering critical information on all traffic within the MPLS network. Furthermore, the Flow Collector makes an ideal tool for targeted troubleshooting—when a performance problem arises, just enable NetFlow at the location and let Flow Collector uncover the issue.

Manage .NET application performance

Once development and testing are completed, management of .NET applications falls into the hands of network operations and application managers. In spite of all the best preparations, failures in deployment will occur. Fine-tuning, troubleshooting and predicting these failures are the responsibility of operations. This job is further complicated by the new set of applications .NET adds to the already complex mix. Compuware Vantage aids in tuning, troubleshooting and managing growth by providing a comprehensive solution covering the entire .NET infrastructure.

With its unique perspective, Vantage identifies HTTP and SOAP traffic—key protocols for Web services. When implemented on an intranet or on dedicated links, Vantage will show how Web services are traversing the segments between users and servers, and will show bottlenecks, response-time statistics and total byte counts. Vantage can also determine if Web services are following intended paths or being routed elsewhere, possibly causing problems on other segments.