NetScout Adds Service-Level Management View

NetScout has added to its nGenius Service Solution, a real-time dashboard aimed at providing organizations with a more unified, business-centric view of the performance of critical transactions, application and networks. nGenius Service Delivery Manager is designed to help organizations view operations from a service-level perspective and automates the detection of service quality problems and emerging security threats across physical, virtual and cloud-based services from the application hosting environment, through the network to the user.

To better understand how services, such as Voice over IP (VoIP) or a sales order application, are performing, IT organizations need to tie together a variety of management information and then group that information into views that are meaningful to business. That could mean a view based on geography or a division. "A lot of tools provide warnings and alarms--the status of a router or the status of database calls in an application, but no view that represents a service level-view," explains Steven Shalita, NetScout's VP of marketing.

Leveraging user-defined service domains, IT administrators can customize and organize views that dynamically align with how services are delivered to the business across physical and virtual infrastructure. Domains are constructed based upon physical and logical attributes, such as a specific applications or services, physical sites, logical workgroups, geographic regions or business units. Service-oriented workflows allow IT users to drill-down into a range of contextual data to assess a situation, triage its impact, and confidently make next-step action decisions.  

With unified contextual views, IT staff can move from high-level service views within a selected service domain, to flow-based transactions, and then to deep packet analysis -- all from a single integrated solution. "A first-level support person can see where a problem is and escalate it to the appropriate person in seconds and minutes rather than days," Shalita says. NetScout has created the dashboard by culling a variety of information across the network. "The network is the single place that connects all the devices, storage, servers and applications," Shalita says. "We pull massing amounts of knowledge from the network--analytics, key performance indicators, metrics on packets flowing across the network."

nGenius Service Delivery Manager leverages NetScout's suite of nGenius intelligent data sources distributed throughout an organization's network. These data sources collect and analyze valuable user traffic on a distributed basis, including the nGenius InfiniStream appliance, the nGenius Virtual Agent for VMware virtual server environments and the nGenius Integrated Agent, which can be integrated into the Cisco Integrated Services Router and other network equipment. The data sources each contain intelligent analytics engines that constantly learn behavior to build baselines of normal performance. The engines continue to analyze data as it comes, and adjust accordingly. "These engines get more and more intelligent over time," Shalita says.The automated analytics enables the identification and reporting of service and network anomalies--deviations in "normal" traffic, application and server usage--in order to detect service degradations before they impact the end user or lead to service meltdowns. The system auto-learns the patterns of service, application and network behavior and automatically self-tunes to adapt to changing service delivery conditions.

Automated management toolsets for determining application performance and service levels is becoming increasingly important. In a recent study conducted by Enterprise Management Associates on end-to-end application management, it was found that many organizations still rely on user calls to find out about application-related problems. In fact, 32 percent of those queried said calls for users is the most common way they find out about application-related problems. While that is down from the 54 percent in 2008, it still indicates that IT is finding out about problems after service is affect. Automation is key to eliminating user calls and improving service levels, Shalita says.

nGenius Service Delivery Manager also helps IT organizations identify risk, emerging threats and attacks that are often missed by signature-based security solutions. While not a pure-play security system, Shalita says the functionality is designed to help companies detect subtle changes in their overall operations--anomalies that can impact performance--caused by malware, for example. Real-time early warning alerts are provided when deviations or policy violations are detected.

The nGenius Service Delivery Manager is contained in the upcoming 4.9 release of the nGenius Service Assurance Solution, which will be available in early July. It leverages all the existing nGenius Intelligent Data Sources and metrics and is tightly integrated the with nGenius Performance Manager and Sniffer Analysis modules.