By Brian Boyko

I wish my love life were as thrilling and fulfilling as the love life of NetQoS Performance Center.  The charming network monitoring suite just hooked up with EMC Smarts.  They not only hooked up quickly, they’ve started cohabitating: Through the NetQoS Connector for EMC Smarts, you can now view performance data from the EMC Smarts management console.

I’m insanely jealous.

When I wake up alone in the morning, I often find myself wondering what it would be like to settle down and find a nice special someone, or some management console, to settle down with.  Someone who cares for you deeply.  Someone who doesn’t overlook your faults, but rather, does everything they can to help you detect and correct them. 

I mean, I know NetQoS Performance Center is my friend, and I’m happy for him. Really.  I just – you know, I’m just kinda waiting for it to be my turn. Where’s my little network suite baboo?

It just seemed the other day that all NetQoS Performance Center was doing was single-direction, trap-level integration with Smarts.  But it came as a complete shock when NetQoS connector came out with a bi-directional orientation which allows the NetQoS Performance Center to alert the Smarts console to a problem, and allows NOC personnel to have direct access from the Smarts console to appropriate NetQoS performance data for quick analysis and troubleshooting. 

You gotta admit, they make a great pair.  Network operations groups relying only on Smarts sometimes didn’t know about an application slowdown until an end-user calls to complain, and then, since they lacked the performance tools to investigate the problem, it used to get escalated to the engineering group, causing all sorts of troubleshooting delays. Now the performance data is right there and NOC groups can start to get to the source of the problem much quicker.

Matt Sherrod, Vice President of Product Management for NetQoS put it this way: “The NetQoS Connector for EMC Smarts is really a shrewd matchmaker, resulting in a marriage between performance and fault that better arms NOC staff to proactively monitor application performance and take action without escalation or having to learn an entirely new product or discipline.”

I’m really bad at weddings.  I don’t know the protocol, don’t know how to address the hosts, and am really lousy at conversations.  Not so for NetQoS Performance Center and Smarts, who, simply clicked in the right way (with a right click) and now include protocol, host and conversation data for every interface to understand traffic composition across the WAN, and response time break-downs by network, server, or application for every TCP-based application to understand where performance issues originate. 

I think most of my performance issues originate from my lack of self confidence, really. Say – do you know if Smarts has a sister?