We’ve been blogging with excerpts from our new VoIP Performance ebook here on Network Performance Daily. Today, Brad Reese gets into the game with his own advice on monitoring VoIP performance using Cisco NetFlow and IP SLA in a story on his Cisco Subnet blog called Are you Taking Advantage of NetFlow and IP SLA?

Brad quotes NetQoS CEO Joel Trammell on the subject. According to Joel, “the number one killer of voice traffic is network latency and jitter. Latency, jitter and packet loss cause poor audio quality and dropped calls. Latency caused by overloaded call managers or network congestion can be a major cause of poor VoIP performance."

Continue reading "Cisco IPSLA and NetFlow Help Network Managers Monitor VoIP Performance" »

"In fact, I was talking with someone the other day," said Jim Metzler. "I don't need to be dramatic, but he said to me, 'Jim, I look at Web 2.0 the way I look at global warming. We're just beginning to realize how serious global warming is and take some steps now. We're not there yet on Web 2.0, but it will have a dramatic impact."

We talked a little bit about how broadband is causing end-users to expect more from the Web apps that they use for work, but here's a basic recap: If a user is used to waiting less than 5 seconds for a YouTube video, they may not be as willing to wait 30 seconds for a database. Things are getting faster, and as such there should be a new emphasis on providing performance.

We are used to information in real-time. Our growth of interconnectedness - indeed, the growth of community - has driven us to new expectations.

So we talked to Jim Metzler about whether Web 2.0 is creating new requirements in network performance.

"I think they will once they get more broadly deployed. I actually think that things like SOA and Web Services, Web 2.0, are going to significantly rachet up the need for a more dicisplined performance management, but I don't think people realize it yet…. I think we're still kind of kicking the phrases around. People are saying, 'Oh, Web 2.0, that's all marketing hype, no one knows what that means, yadda yadda yadda' So I think we're still in the denial stage. But I think that, over time, it will have a significant impact on the need for performance management and how we do performance management."

So, what can companies do about Web 2.0?

"I think where's there's SOA Web services, the bottom line is, for starters, we can't chart a course to improve, if we don't know where we're going. It's as simple as that on one level. So we need to continue to educate ourselves as to what exactly Web 2.0 is. And you're not going to be able to get a very precise definition, but you begin to read and see some commonality. 'Is my company heading in that direction? If not Web 2.0, how about these SOA Web services?'"

"I think that on the infrastructure side, to understand the evolving application disciplines, architectures, whatever you want to call it, not, so to speak, just in general but as their company is evolving to it, to figure out what that means for them - Initially it just comes down to guessing at the high level picture and then coming down closer to the ground. As you have some of the monitoring tools that people are deploying, they begin to place more emphasis to understanding the flow of data in an application."

"Becoming more application aware today, not just what applications are running on the network, (that's a good starting point,) but how do they actually transfer data and where are the performance roadblocks? So, it's kind of getting a handle on today while beginning to understand where we're going to evolve to over the next one to five years."

When asked if there was anything else he wanted to mention, Jim Metzler said: "Let's hope the Red Sox can beat the Indians."

This phenomenon isn't limited to the Gummi Bears. There were protests in Mexico over the rising price of corn tortillas. German beers are feeling the pinch as farmers trade in hops and barley for the more lucrative rapeseed and corn. Jolly Time Popcorn isn't feeling so jolly after corn prices went up 70 percent. Between the double whammy of increased cost of corn and increased cost of every other crop because farmers are switching to growing corn instead, it's gotten to the point where it's cheaper to feed livestock, such as pigs, human snack food, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Back to network performance. Consider for the moment, that the path of the food we eat, from raw ingredients to our supermarket shelves consists of a "network" of sorts, this is a classic case of a sudden, unanticipated spike in demand from another endpoint in the network that is wreaking havoc on the network itself. Or, farmers switching to corn at the expense of other crops seems like a classic case of over provisioning one "application" on the network at the expense of all others.

These changes may have seemed insignificant at the time. Many disruptive changes do, which is why you need to have good visibility into your network - whether it's an enterprise network or a food distribution network.

Even a slight increase, for example, in network demand has a number of ancillary costs that many people don't look at. Greater demand of resources doesn't just require more bandwidth. It may necessitate greater processing power, which necessitates more hardware, which necessitates more power and more cooling.

I mean, when even the cost of alternative fuels are going up, many more people are going to be telecommuting from their homes instead of driving or flying in for business. If you're not prepared for a change like that by being aware of how your network is being used, and what changes are coming down the pipe, your network is in just as much trouble as the Gummi Bears are.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

If it sounds like you've read this story before, you probably have. Internet politics in 2000 was newsworthy because, like anyone on AOL, politicians had their own Web pages. In 2004, internet politics were newsworthy because, like anyone with a Blogger.com account, politicians had their own blogs. The new technology of the Web which will "revolutionize politics" this coming election year, but which everyone seems to have found out about two years ago, seems to be YouTube and other "Web 2.0" applications. At least, that's what CNN seems to have focused on with its recent "YouTube" debate of the Democratic Presidential Primaries.

Franken's campaign site will soon include this "Web2.0-style" interactive events map (top) and automatic slideshow (bottom,) seen here in a late beta version. Schlough informed NPD that it would likely be available Friday, August 10, 2007. The events map runs on a combination of Flash and MySQL, while the slideshow runs off of Flash and XML.

Still, that cynicism of overhyped coverage should be reserved not for the politicians but for the news outlets covering the election that grasp onto novelty for novelty's sake. These technologies - Web, blog, and online video - are communications tools. They are important because they very well can help honest politicians communicate with their constituents.

Of course, they can also help dishonest politicians seem to communicate without actually communicating. Most news coverage of the politics of the Internet doesn't actually bother to help people make the distinction.

But what of the people tasked to introduce technology into political campaigns? What is it like to be working on a campaign's IT team in the age when it only recently became clear that a political campaign needs an IT team? We had an opportunity to talk with Jon-David Schlough, who manages IT operations and online communications for the Al Franken campaign for senate in Minnesota.

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Continue reading "The Intersection of Politics and Technology: Talking with Jon-David Schlough, Interactive & IT Operations for the Al Franken for Senate, 2008 campaign." »

By John Mao, Product Manager at NetQoS

Cisco's NetFlow technology provides flow statistics from IOS-enabled routers capable of characterizing traffic on a network. Information provided by NetFlow includes network protocols, ports, IP addresses, and much more.

Five years ago, NetFlow was a new buzzword floating around various companies' networking groups. Some immediately saw the management benefits it could provide while others continued to use the network probes they knew best. However, fast forward to today, and a large majority of engineers are intimately familiar with the benefits and uses of NetFlow.

Although initially implemented by Cisco, NetFlow is emerging as an IETF standard: Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX). Based on the NetFlow Version 9 implementation, IPFIX is going to be the industry standard in the very near future. Network infrastructure vendors, including Nortel and others, are already adding IPFIX support to their enterprise switches and routers.

Thousands of IT enterprises worldwide have embraced NetFlow technology which is capable of providing them the same flow information traditional probes provide. Because of the lower cost to deploy and maintain NetFlow, it is easy to see why so many have made the switch.

The router's memory can retain the vast amounts of in-depth statistics only for a short time. NetFlow/IPFIX Management products (like NetQoS's own ReporterAnalyzer) export the NetFlow data periodically, store and parse the data.

That said, here are six tips for improving network visibility and performance using the NetFlow data that you're probably already getting from your routers. These tips work best with ReporterAnalyzer (hey, it's our company blog and if we didn't think our products were the best, we wouldn't be making them), but should be helpful even to those using more basic tools.

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Continue reading "NetFlow Monitoring: Six Tips for Improving Network Visibility and Performance Using Cisco IOS NetFlow Data" »

By Brian Boyko

Fingerpointing - it's a frustrating and lingering problem for IT organizations. Whenever, application performance degrades, all of a sudden application, server, and networking teams start pointing the finger at one another in an attempt to pass the blame. But isn't that why we have network monitoring tools in the first place - to tell you where the problem is, so that you can fix it faster.

Theoretically, yes. Unfortunately, network teams may be suffering from an undeserved "credibility gap" that prevents companies from taking timely action when problems arise.

For so very long, problems with network performance have often been laid at the feet of the networking team because, quite frankly, to the end user, an application problem, a server problem, and a network link problem all look like the same thing. "The network is slow." So even when it's not the network, the network team often gets the blame.

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Continue reading "Fingerpointing, Frustrated Network Engineers, and the Application Performance Blame Game" »

*Update on Wafaa Bilal and Recreational Network Traffic

The Brain Behind Paintball Artist Bilal: ‘Domestic Tension’ Sysadmin Jason Potkanski talks about how he helped keep the paintball-via-webcam site running.

Jason Potkanski, who works at the Citizendium Foundation, read the Chicago Tribune Daywatch, to find Wafaa Bilal’s site, Domestic Tension. He looked at the site and saw that it was getting swamped over a DSL link. He sent Ben Chang, lead software programmer of the project, an e-mail offering help, and got an answer back the next day. He visited the project site at the Flatfile Galleries on the 11th – a day when the gun was down most of the day due to the strain that the Internet was placing on the connection – the DSL line and commercial-grade router they used were taking a beating from the Slashdot-like effect of a small pipe.

He immediately offered some performance optimization techniques, such as setting keepalives to 3, and installing eAcellerator to speed up the PHP script, replacing the memory inefficient tail function for the chat. And of course, he told Bilal that he would need a dedicated line to the Internet, and by the next day, they got an OC3-quality connection to Steadfast, at Equinex in Chicago. Immediately he saw an improvement.

He also mounted the webcam image and chatlog/shooter log via NFS, remoted in to do the mounts and copy the application over to the Steadfast connection.

Another problem was the use of XML requests, which wasn’t viable on all browsers, and the fact that the original configuration kept three separate requests open for the chat, the shooter log, and the web cam.

If he had the system to design all over again, he’d design it to use a backend database for the logging features, combine the shooter log and chat so that the application requires only two keepalive connections, not three.

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Continue reading "The Brain Behind Paintball Artist Bilal: ‘Domestic Tension’ Sysadmin Jason Potkanski talks about how he helped keep the paintball-via-webcam site running and Recreational Network Traffic." »

By Ben Erwin, Product Manager for NetQoS Performance Center 3.0
& Steve Harriman, Vice President of Marketing at NetQoS:

We've recently held a Webinar to discuss NetQoS Performance Center 3.0. We had a Q&A session there and we would like to reproduce some of the questions attendees asked about NetQoS Performance Center 3.0, and the answers we provided. We also plan to answer the questions we couldn't get to during the Webinar on this blog by the end of this week.

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Continue reading "Q&A on NetQoS Performance Center 3.0" »

By Brian Boyko

Back in November of 2006, (which seems like such a long time ago,) Network Performance Daily published a column by Carol Schiraldi about "why enterprise developers use Java and game programmers use C++."

We published this for a number of reasons - but the main one was that typically, enterprise developers are programming for function first, reliability, second, and performance over the network, if it's even considered at all, is a tertiary thought.

What this means is that applications, developed originally for the LAN environment, often take up valuable network resources unnecessarily when placed into a WAN environment.

[Full disclosure: NetQoS sells network performance management software which diagnoses problems like "chatty apps," and we want you to buy them. Anyway…]

But one area where this isn't a significant problem is in game development, which was the thesis of the original column. Game developers, who realize their games have to perform well over the Internet, typically build with performance in mind first.

This was confirmed when we had a chance to talk to Timothee Besset, a game developer at ID Software, developers of the famous Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake series of games. Here's what he said about this issue:

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Continue reading "ID Software Developer Timothee Besset on Network Performance in Games" »

by Chandra Hosek

Dr. Cathy Fulton, NetQoS’s chief technology officer, will be at the Computer Measurement Group’s (CMG) 32nd annual conference in Reno, Nev., on Thursday, discussing the trials and tribulations of achieving and maintaining optimal application performance across enterprise wide area networks.

In a session entitled “Best Laid Plans: Enterprise Network Performance Case Studies and Lessons Learned,” Cathy Fulton will share real-world case studies that demonstrate how well-intentioned network and systems engineering efforts can sometimes produce unexpected results - and how to avoid these mistakes - drawn from her years as a leading network engineering consultant and her in-the-trenches experience working in large enterprise network environments. Examples will include the results of implementing caching devices to improve application response times for remote users, improper application of QoS techniques, active agent monitoring software running amuck, and others.

NetQoS will also present a vendor training session at the CMG conference, from Dr. Steve Fulton, our director of product management, called “Why Utilization is not a Proxy for Performance.” Many IT professionals monitor utilization as a proxy for network performance, but modern techniques are proving this is not the best approach, especially with the advent of WAN optimization technologies. The most meaningful performance metric is end user response time captured by measuring real user transactions which, when combined with traffic flow data and traditional device statistics, enable network managers to optimize performance and accurately assess infrastructure needs. In his presentation, Steve will provide best practice examples that illustrate this new approach.

Ed Tittel, contributor to Network Performance Daily, has provided a rundown of events from the CMG 2006 conference at NetPerformance.com.

Chandra Hosek is Public Relations Manager at NetQoS.