The NetQoS Advantage for Service Providers and Systems Integrators

Deliver Committed Service Levels to Your Customers

Retain and increase revenue and margin from existing customers, win new business, quickly troubleshoot problems in the application delivery infrastructure, and become indispensible – with industry-leading network performance management technology.

Service providers and systems integrators are facing several challenges in expanding their businesses and remaining competitive.

It’s getting harder to find, keep and grow customers.

It’s increasingly challenging to meet the special requirements of large customer projects, including much more stringent and granular service level agreements (SLAs). You need to know how well a new or upgraded network is meeting expectations – as it evolves, and probably over expansive, complex environments. You need to quickly find bottlenecks in the application delivery infrastructure before they affect clients.

Customers are coming to you with requests for application-aware performance management services.

Too often, you don’t have the visibility you need to solve problems or the metrics to meet tougher SLAs. You lack insight into the causes of degraded service because you don’t have instrumentation in place, so it’s hard to be confident that you can meet service levels. More customer contracts are requiring visibility and transparency, so you need a workable solution – and fast.

Network performance management technology from NetQoS can help you deliver committed service levels to your customers – cost-effectively, consistently, and confidently.

How NetQoS Can Help

Our suite of products, called the NetQoS Performance Center, lets you instrument customers’ sites without the use of probes; the products use customers’ own network infrastructures to collect data and metrics. Our technology maximizes the value of Cisco investments and works in concert with other leading tools such as Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager, IBM Tivoli Netcool, EMC Smarts and HP OpenView.

Our unique no-probe approach provides a rapid-rollout, non-invasive solution to instrumenting your customers’ environments – one that scales easily as needs change.

Using NetQoS products, you can monitor performance globally, over complex, diverse, multi-vendor networks, to determine how well a new or upgraded infrastructure is meeting the customer’s expectations, or how well applications are performing. You can also include our performance-monitoring products as part of a combined offering.

With NetQoS products, service providers and systems integrators can:

Reduce the complexity of monitoring applications across global networks.
Improve end-user productivity and the end-user experience for your customers.
Troubleshoot problems faster and avoid penalties associated with SLA violations.
Establish a common language across groups that can eliminate the “blame game” when problems arise. Our passive/non-invasive deployment shows exactly where the problem is, so that you can focus on restoring service levels to the customer instead of looking for whom to blame.
Meet Business Service Management (BSM) goals, by measuring the things that truly matter to customers: application performance and the end-user experience. Become an indispensable partner to your customers.
Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery by using a single, intelligent platform for performance monitoring at your site and your customers’ sites. Prove your value to customers every day by letting them access data and metrics via a single Web-based portal for performance data that integrates easily with your corporate portal.
Demonstrate unique value and thought leadership by providing your clients with end-to-end visibility for critical application performance across a multi-sourced, multi-vendor environment.

As your infrastructure and your business evolve, our instrumentation strategy of passive data collection and alliances with major vendors ensure that you will never have to do a wholesale replacement of probes to keep pace with changing infrastructure.

Here are three scenarios describing the successful use of NetQoS products by service providers to deliver high service levels to customers.

Simplifying SLA Monitoring for a Large Customer

As part of the contract for one of the largest outsourcing deals in the world, a leading outsourcer needed to produce application response time measurements for SLAs reporting for over 300 mission-critical applications running on five continents for a Global 50 manufacturing organization. The outsourcer used NetQoS SuperAgent, the end-to-end performance monitoring module of the NetQoS Performance Center, because it was the only product on the market that could provide visibility into performance for all users across the globe. SuperAgent was deployed to data centers and application hosting facilities, providing the necessary SLA data and enabling the project team to actually return budget to the business.

Using SuperAgent, the outsourcer was able to:

Simplify and strengthen application response time measurement – for performing SLA calculations of delivered performance against expected performance at a highly granular level, and for generating reports for the customer
Automate the collection and reporting of SLA compliance to customer compliance and oversight committees
Do passive data collection – monitor from central locations without requiring any measurements at the end-user sites
Avoid installing desktop agents – providing its customer with non-intrusive, cost-effective monitoring

SuperAgent provides a consistent and common set of service quality metrics for internal users and external service providers, even if no formal SLAs are in place.

Deploying QoS Policies for a Fortune 50 Customer

A large IT outsourcing firm had a contract with a Fortune 50 enterprise to deploy advanced quality-of-service (QoS) policies across the customer’s global WAN to ensure that the most important traffic received adequate bandwidth. The outsourcer used NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer, the network traffic analysis module of the NetQoS Performance Center, enabling them to understand the contents of each link and how the link was utilized prior to changes, and then to validate the effectiveness of the new QoS policies on traffic. In addition, ReporterAnalyzer was able to highlight traffic that was expected to fit within the policies but that was not behaving as planned.

ReporterAnalyzer delivered the outsourcer the following important capabilities:

Link analysis – for fine-grained analysis of traffic and links across a complex global WAN
QoS policy reporting (through Type of Service tracking) – for monitoring how traffic maps to classes of service, for quick identification of problems and reclassification of traffic, and for reports for billing and SLA purposes
Rapid rollout – the ability to use the customer’s existing network infrastructure (Cisco and NetFlow) for monitoring, eliminating the need to install probes

ReporterAnalyzer’s reports were used as the final report to the customer, to demonstrate completion of the QoS rollout and coverage for each link.

Preventing SLA Degradation while Upgrading The Service Desk

A leading provider of outsourced IT solutions was migrating its mission-critical service desk platform from a single UNIX server to a load-balanced Windows cluster. The company was afraid of the effects on their client delivery operations during the migration. To mitigate this risk, the company deployed NetQoS SuperAgent to monitor performance and baseline response times before the change, to monitor the migration while in process, and finally to ensure contracted performance once the migration was completed.

SuperAgent gave the outsourcer the following important capabilities:

Before/after change analysis – to closely monitor the migration and identify bottlenecks for correction
Baselining – for automatically generating a baseline for each application for each location, then monitoring average performance against the baseline based on 10 metrics
Problem identification and isolation – diagnostics for understanding which applications, servers and networks are deviating from normal, to quickly locate the root cause and drill down to the appropriate components – shortening MTTR By using SuperAgent, the company was able to detect performance problems in the new infrastructure and diagnose the sources that were causing decreased service levels.

How NetQoS Can Benefit Your Business

1. Retain Customers by Delivering High-performing Application Infrastructure

Offer highly acclaimed products that are standards among large companies
Keep raising the bar for application service levels
Demonstrate delivered performance of key applications over complex, heterogeneous, wide area infrastructures

2. Increase Revenue and Margin from Existing Customers

Identify additional, differentiated services that will be easy sales to current customers
Scale the client delivery infrastructure to match customer growth, while controlling costs

3. Become an Indispensible Vendor

Maintain superior service levels while controlling infrastructure costs
Continuously demonstrate your value through drill-down, real-time reporting

For more information on how NetQoS can help your company, please contact us at (877) 835-9575 or request more information.