By Ben Erwin

Product Manager, NetQoS.

After watching Jamaica destroy the competition in the male and female 100M races at the Olympics, I was reminded that I still have a crystal ball on loan from Miss Cleo. Needless to say, it was time to take another look into the future of network performance management.

After dusting off the ball, I began summoning the network performance spirits (via TCP/IP of course) and gazed deep into a phenomenon that really startled me. It seemed that IT managers were surrounded by performance management vendors claiming all of the capabilities necessary to manage application delivery.

But the spirits showed me that it was false!

Fancy user interfaces and marketing jargon were covering “checkbox” approaches to network monitoring. All of the vendors were touting NetFlow-based traffic analysis in a “me too” style of approach. Alas, none of them could scale beyond a few thousand interfaces and none of them could show much data beyond a few top 10 reports.

As the IT managers became frustrated with the lack of scalability and detail, the vendors came back to the table with a solution consisting of packet capture probes scattered throughout the data center and every remote site and really no answer to leverage NetFlow on a global scale. The sighs were deafening. When managers asked about integrating NetFlow with other forms of network performance data, piercing cries could be heard all over the world when vendors presented a lackluster version of their “portal” gris-gris with a separate tab for each data source – no reports actually integrated the data and IT managers begin growing increasing mad. But the bad mojo didn’t stop…

The boiling point was VoIP monitoring. VoIP had become the only option for electronic voice communication. Vendors were hopping from IT shop to shop showing off their new VoIP monitoring capabilities consisting of software agents. Instead of taking a passive approach to monitoring VoIP delivery from the data center, IT managers began sacrificing all of their free time and budget managing and deploying software agents all over the network. When IT managers asked the vendors about technologies like Cisco CBQoS or IP SLA for managing VoIP, vendors came back to the table with basic SNMP monitoring tools that did nothing more than provide basic MIB II statistics. Again, the vendors presented a checkbox, when a more robust solution was required.

I couldn’t stand it anymore as I knew IT anarchy was right around the corner. As more performance management vendors develop checkbox add-ons to their existing tools or acquire outdated technology such as agents and probes. I asked the spirits how IT managers will survive. Their answer was, “Reply Hazy, Try Again.”