• Network Performance Daily: Best Practices for Monitoring Business Transactions, part 2 of 2
• ComputerWorld: Gartner predicts hot, cramped time for data centers
• CIO: Is VoIP Set Up to Fail?
• ITSMWatch.com: IT Costs, Value and Role of ITIL
• ZDNet: Quality IT service comes at a price

Continue reading "Daily Links: Active vs. passive monitoring, data center heat, VoIP hype, ITIL value and costs" »

• Network Performance Daily: Best Practices for Monitoring Business Transactions, part 1 of 2
• Byte and Switch: Cisco Salvo in 4-Gig FC - Storage Networking News Analysis
• Network World: Ethernet, media focus force telecom shift - Part 1
• Network World: NYC telecom journey Day 2: Getting sucked into IP's black hole and awaiting a network endpoint explosion - Part 2
• Macehiter Ward-Dutton: IT service management - road maps, not short cuts
• erp4it: ITIL and ITSM politics

Continue reading "Daily Links: Business transaction monitoring, new Cisco switch, network endpoint explosion, plus more" »

by Cathy Fulton

Monitoring business transactions over the network has never been more critical to operational efficiency. Yet, there’s much confusion over methodology.

The implementation choices consist of different deployment strategies (client-site or server-site, agent or appliance) and distinct monitoring technologies (active or passive). Each of these options has individual strengths and weaknesses. This series of articles discusses industry best practices for effectively monitoring business transactions in a global environment.

Part 1 of 2: Deployment Strategies

One of the most important decisions is the deployment strategy for the business monitoring solution. Should monitors be deployed at the client sites or should they be deployed at the data centers? Should software agents or hardware appliances be used? While this may seem like a minor matter, it has the most serious ramifications from both an immediate “headache” and long-term recurring cost standpoint.

Continue reading "Best Practices for Monitoring Business Transactions, part 1 of 2" »

NetQoS VP Steve Harriman is attending the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit this week in Las Vegas. It's the first time for the event since the industry downturn in 2001 and NetQoS is exhibiting there because we feel that the role of Networking has been elevated in importance to the point at which it warrants an executive focused event. And, Gartner events are always very educational and well-attended. It's the right place to be.

In addition to Dr. Malone's keynote and NetQoS's Solution Provider Session, I also went to a talk by Thomas Shelman on the second day of the Summit. Shelman is CIO of Northrop Grumman Corporation, the second largest defense contractor in the world. As you might imagine, he runs a very large IT organization. Seven CIOs from different business units report to him.

He said his greatest challenge and most rewarding experience, although devastating too, was leading the organization to restore computing and networking infrastructure and services after Katrina pounded two key Northrop Grumman facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The two NG data centers in La. and Miss. were fully configured for redundancy with hot fail-over between systems in both locations. To ensure both data centers would not be affected by “traditional” disasters, such as local power failures, flooding, accidents, etc., they were located 150 miles apart. Unfortunately, the destruction of Katrina was more than 150 miles wide and took both data centers out. (Northrop Grumman put out a press release describing the devastation they encountered.)

Continue reading "Notes on the Gartner Summit in Las Vegas, Part 3" »

• ComputerWorld: Gartner meeting sees big network role
• sFlow vs. NetFlow: What is the big difference and which should you support?
• GigaOM » Is ADSL2+ Bad for VoIP?
• Business Communications Review Magazine - Looming Crisis In The WAN?
• dougmclure.net: Network Performance Blog

Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-11-17" »

By Steve Harriman

NetQoS VP Steve Harriman is attending the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit this week in Las Vegas. It's the first time for the event since the industry downturn in 2001 and NetQoS is exhibiting there because we feel that the role of Networking has been elevated in importance to the point at which it warrants an executive focused event. And, Gartner events are always very educational and well-attended. It's the right place to be.

The speaker for the second day’s keynote speech was Dr. Thomas Malone, Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management.

I noticed that a surprisingly large number of hands went up when he asked attendees if they had corporate blogs and if their organizations allowed individuals to have their own.

He discussed organization models and how organizations are becoming more distributed, both physically and in how they operate – more distributed decision making. Successful organizations have found the way to fully leverage the intelligence and creativity their employees have.

Employees who are empowered to use their capabilities to the fullest have more fun and are more productive. The networking tie-in here is that the network is the enabler of organizational empowerment.

Continue reading "Notes on the Gartner Summit in Las Vegas, Part 2" »

By Steve Harriman

NetQoS VP Steve Harriman is attending the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit this week in Las Vegas. It's the first time for the event since the industry downturn in 2001 and NetQoS is exhibiting there because we feel that the role of Networking has been elevated in importance to the point at which it warrants an executive focused event. And, Gartner events are always very educational and well-attended. It's the right place to be.

It is worth noting that one of the key themes of the first day is that Network professionals should move beyond the plumbing and be part of the solution to the application delivery problem. The idea that network professionals need to look at response time and focus on end-to-end performance is a message NetQoS has been trying to spread. Here are a few details from the first day keynote to put this into context:

Continue reading "Notes on the Gartner Summit in Las Vegas, Part 1" »

When it comes to understanding network performance, exploring the following basic definition will help many people find their way deep into the heart of this subject:

Network performance is a process to ensure efficient use of network resources, while minimizing the impact of resource contention.

Continue reading "Understanding Performance Management" »

For the longest time, network engineers—particularly those at ISPs and carriers—have kept close watch on link utilization to help them decide how their networks are doing. Once usage levels creep above various thresholds, their answer to provisioning and capacity planning has invariably been "boost the bandwidth," as something of a panacea for network performance problems.

But while increasing link bandwidth can (and does) address certain kinds of network performance issues, it cannot solve all problems. It’s important to understand that all traffic must be transmitted from one point (the sender) to another (the receiver) across a network link. Any complete network transmission involves numerous such pairs of correspondents, as messages move from their original senders to their ultimate receivers, and replies or responses trace their way back in turn from the ultimate receiver to the original sender. But all such transmissions are subject to these three delay components:

Continue reading "Bandwidth is Not a Panacea" »

The Gartner Symposium ITXPO was a hotbed of information and debate on the topic of network performance management, and a venue for the exchange of ideas from people throughout the IT industry. We expect this debate to continue at the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit in Las Vegas November 14-16 and we will report on those details from the event. Don't miss it.

In the mean time, here are some highlights from ITXPO:

Continue reading "Network management the hot topic at Gartner symposium ITXPO" »