Network Performance Monitoring Pressure Ratchets Up

Network performance monitoring sure isn't what it used to be. Given the changes that have unfolded in the past few years--private clouds, public clouds, the growing need for Wi-Fi access and increase in mobile devices--the very idea of a network belonging to an organization has all but evaporated. So how can organizations get a view across the network? That's the question facing enterprises today.

"Old-school tools demanded you owned all the pieces of infrastructure in order to measure and monitor it," Matt Stevens, CTO at AppNeta in Boston, explains. "At the end of the day, there is no single network. It's a combination of multiple networks and the single biggest challenge is how to understand end-to-end performance across networks that I don't own and yet still have to rely on."

Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), agreed that end-to-end visibility is very important, especially in highly dynamic virtualized environments. In many cases, workloads are shifting based on CPU and memory constraints without any regard to the impact on the network.

"If you only have one to three VMs per machine this is probably not an issue, but as organizations increase VM density to five to 10, as most have now, and then 25 or more over the next couple of years, this could be a significant problem," he says. "Organizations need to have complete visibility up to the VMs or, ideally, applications, to better understand where they can be moved to in order to guarantee or optimize its performance."

The emphasis on application performance monitoring (APM) is on the rise. Once viewed as something of a luxury, it's fast becoming a critical need for organizations to get a better handle on locating the sources of bottlenecks. And as more companies migrate to the cloud, the top considerations include the ability to monitor, track and report on real-time and historical network traffic data.

"The reason why network performance is generally failing is because it's been too down in the weeds, too network-centric, frankly," says Stevens. "It needs to be more end-user focused and application-centric. At the end of the day, we build networks to support applications, not the other way around. Too many network tools are designed in and of themselves to look at the network as if it was a standalone element, and it really isn't."

Has that led to an increase in complaints from end users? Probably, according to Laliberte. But that's also likely a reflection on how much more dependent the compute infrastructure is on the network nowadays, he says.

"In order to take advantage of all the great server virtualization mobility features, there needs to be a networked storage environment. Organizations are consolidating data centers and, therefore, hosting more applications centrally and remote offices and branch offices access them over the WAN; the consumerization of IT has led to a proliferation of mobile devices entering the workplace and straining campus networks," he says. "Even SaaS and public cloud offerings rely on the network to deliver a solid experience. So when you look at all these factors, it wouldn't surprise me that complaints may be up."

Does that mean network monitoring is failing? That all depends on what organizations have deployed, if anything at all.

"In the past, the environments were much more static and monitoring tools were used in a much more reactive or fire-fighting mode," he said. "With organizations moving at a much faster pace and being more virtualized, network monitoring tools need to adapt to the new paradigm. They are becoming more application aware, more real-time and provide much greater visibility and deeper levels of granularity. In order to take advantage of these capabilities, though, organizations need to make the up-front investment to purchase, deploy and train staff on these solutions."

Next: How Enterprises Can Address Network Performance MonitoringHaseeb Budhani, chief product officer at Infineta Systems in San Francisco, says enterprises need to solve latency and WAN bottleneck issues across the network to move big data traffic between data centers. The company's recently announced FlowTune feature set attempts to address those issues.

"One of the problems we found is the bandwidth deployed between data centers for things such as storage applications, backup, etc., was entirely unaddressed four years ago," he says. "We focus on what we call the big traffic WAN that's tying data centers together ... For every data packet being processed, if I were to add a few milliseconds of latency it's not a big deal. But if I add a few milliseconds of latency to every block of data being replicated between data centers, over time that adds up and my overall process, be it for storage or moving a specific amount of data within a specific amount of time, those goals will not be met."

FlowTune aims to solve two significant IT pain points: buying more bandwidth to deal with the growing volume of data and stopping data packets from being dropped when there isn't enough bandwidth available.

So are organizations buying more bandwidth in an effort to deal with WAN bottlenecks, or are they trying to make due with "old school" network monitoring tools? ESG did some research last year specifically around WAN connections to remote offices and branch offices and found most were still buying more bandwidth to solve problems. The consultancy did see an increase in organizations buying WAN optimization technology to help defer costs, however.

"Clearly, though there is an increased effort to determine what is going over the pipes, which was reported as a major challenge for them, and to find out what applications are hogging all the bandwidth," says Laliberte. "With the Olympics coming up this summer, for instance, organizations need to decide if they are going to allow employees to watch the events at work ... It's not just the Olympics, though; with video becoming a more important part of communications at large organizations, it will be imperative to know if a CEO corporatewide broadcast has enough bandwidth to work successfully."

Michael Witherspoon, manager of network integration services at Co-operators General Insurance in Guelph, Ontario, was charged with finding a solution that would allow one of Canada's largest insurance companies to ensure that it was receiving the network throughput for which it was paying top dollar. Being a financial institution, it was also a matter of regulatory compliance and not solely a corporate mandate.

"Our network is a wholly managed solution provided by a large service provider right up to and including the ports on the switch in our LAN closet. As part of that managed service, they don't provide us with much visibility into the network," he explains. "Most use SNMP to provide all kinds of statistical and current information on your network. Because of their security policies, they wouldn't allow us to have SNMP access."

The kind of reporting information Co-operators was being given was far too basic to provide any kind of real group performance management information.

"It was barely adequate enough to provide us with any type of SLA measurements," says Witherspoon. "I'm sure if we worked with them they could provide better tools, but then there would be a length of time for them to implement and a cost to it, etc."

Thus, Co-operators conducted a trial run of AppNeta's PathView Cloud and found about a dozen locations where it had requested certain service levels, but the service provider was not holding up its end of the rope.

"That allowed us to go back and get a credit from them in the neighborhood of $70,000, which in turn I used to buy AppNeta's product," says Witherspoon.

Simplifying network performance tools and reducing the cost to deploy them is in high demand, according to AppNeta's Stevens.

"Too many network performance tools are complicated, heavyweight, there's a lot of installation required, you have to go procure hardware and figure out where you're going to install it and the IT team that's going to manage it," he says. "What ends up happening is your IT staff ends up viewing network management as one more task that they have to do."

PathView Cloud is a cloud-delivered product designed to provide IT teams with the data regarding what's happening on their networks and which devices and users are contributing to performance problems.

"We think it boils down to you need to understand the path, the application and the network traffic," says Stevens. "It's a combination of these multiple vantage points that allows you get your arm around network performance and implement what we consider performance management lifecycle."