Warning: Information contained herein is not actual medical advice and should not be used to aid a fallen co-worker suffering from a heart attack. However, in certain cases, it may prevent high blood pressure, headache, anxiety, depression, anger, and insomnia.

An old saying in IT: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Or as one of our customers told me, “one test is worth 1,000 opinions.” If you subscribe to those ideas, and you’re a customer of ours, I have good news. NetQoS customers have a wide array of data at their fingertips to conduct a meaningful “CPR” session.

• Check Status – Executive or management level visibility into performance of application response times, device level statistics, or network traffic composition.


• Plan Ahead and Avoid Problems – Baseline current performance, make and justify investment decisions to improve performance. Our customers are using our tools to gauge


• React and Recover – Identify hot spots and perform rapid trouble isolation and resolution.

(By the way, this is not to be confused with our services CPR engagement, which is "Critical Problem Resolution." Aren’t mnemonics neat?)

Of course, there aren’t any network or application engineers who don’t want tools to help them plan new work activities and respond effectively when faced with a difficult problems. But there’s often a bit of hesitation when it comes to management reports – a prevailing attitude is that giving management level visibility into the network is a bit like handing someone a stick and asking them to beat you roughly about the head and shoulders.

Certainly, that’s one way of looking at it. But, I’ve always found that somehow and in some way, performance management information is going to “get out”. Someone will complain that the network sure is slow. Or your boss may get blind-sided in a dark hallway by an angry user.

Or, alternatively, you can provide performance visibility to management and enlist their support in fixing any problems you find.

As network and application engineers, it’s easy to think of yourself as doctor to the network. No doctor, however, would conceal high-risk factors for heart disease from a patient.