The NetQoS Advantage for Service Providers and Systems Integrators

Scale Your IT Operations to Seize New Business Opportunities

Meet the needs of your business and your customers’ businesses, control infrastructure costs, reduce the risk of change, and proactively troubleshoot application and network performance problems – with industry-leading network performance management technology.

To expand their businesses and remain competitive, service providers and systems integrators need high-performing IT operations that can accommodate constant change, support business growth, and meet ever-increasing customer expectations for application delivery. IT operations must be able to scale with the business while controlling IT costs to protect margins.

IT staff need to be able to take quick, decisive actions about the IT infrastructure to keep ahead of business needs and to make the right investments.

It’s critical to understand the impact of changes on service delivery. In fact, multiple industry research studies show that infrastructure change is the biggest culprit for performance degradation. For example, when you upgrade an application, swap out a router, or install a new version of an operating system, you must understand how those changes affected the performance of your client’s critical applications served by the same infrastructure. You need to be able to thoroughly understand the results of pilot projects – such as an upgrade to a key server – before deploying the technologies company-wide.

When problems arise, you need to be able to cut through the complexity of the environment to get to the root of the problem and shorten mean time to repair (MTTR).

Network performance management technology from NetQoS can help you build scalable IT operations that can keep up with the business.

How NetQoS Can Help

NetQoS adds another dimension – performance – to IT decision-making.

Our solution, called the NetQoS Performance Center, provides insight into your entire application delivery infrastructure. NetQoS Performance Center uniquely combines application response time, long-term packet capture, traffic analysis, device performance, anomaly detection, and VoIP quality of experience monitoring in a solution that scales to the global needs of the largest service providers and systems integrators.

Via its centralized Web-based console, the NetQoS Performance Center integrates and presents data from these critical metrics to help you be more effective in network troubleshooting, service level management, and capacity planning.

NetQoS products and services are used by hundreds of service providers, large enterprises, and government organizations worldwide to manage and improve application delivery across their large, complex networks. 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.

The NetQoS Performance Center requires no probes or agents to be installed at remote sites; you can use your existing network infrastructure for data collection. Our instrumentation strategy of passive data collection and alliances with major vendors means that you will never have to do a wholesale replacement of probes as your infrastructure evolves.

When you roll out new infrastructure services for customers, these same capabilities enable you to instrument customers’ sites with an efficient, non-invasive solution. So, you can monitor the critical performance metrics in the customers’ environments – to meet stringent SLAs with the least cost and effort.

Using the NetQoS Performance Center enables IT organizations to optimize the delivery of critical application services to end users, mitigate the risks from change, and make the most efficient use of resources.

With NetQoS technology, you can:

Reduce the time and cost of delivering and monitoring applications across vast global networks.
Troubleshoot problems faster and avoid penalties associated with SLA violations.
Understand the impact of changes and make changes to the network with the confidence that they will help and not hurt applications.
Determine the most effective changes to be made to increase performance and security.
Establish a common language across vendors 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.
Mitigate risk

Here are two scenarios describing the successful use of NetQoS products, to give you an idea of what NetQoS can do for you.

Maintaining Customer Service during a Network Changeover

One of the world’s largest systems integrators was rolling out a new MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) network. The company needed to understand the effect of customer traffic on the new network. Were undesirable protocols coming onto the network? As traffic from new customers was added, how would it affect performance or existing applications and customers? Is more bandwidth required? If so, where and how much?

The company turned to NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer to understand the composition and volume of traffic. ReporterAnalyzer, the traffic analysis module of the NetQoS Performance Center, gives network professionals insight into how application traffic is affecting network performance. Moreover, because ReporterAnalyzer does not require installation of any probes or agents, the company was able to use the customer’s existing network infrastructure (Cisco and Cisco IOS® NetFlow) to gather performance data. This shortened time to value and reduced service delivery costs.

ReporterAnalyzer gave the IT operations team the following abilities:

Change impact analysis – to avoid inadvertently preventing customers from executing transactions when the old links were turned off
Traffic analysis source and composition– for validating that traffic was in fact coming from customers’ end-users and for identifying key applications for billing-assurance purposes
Link utilization analysis – for ensuring adequate bandwidth when turning up new sites
Capacity planning – for monitoring utilization and requirements for additional bandwidth

NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer was the first enterprise-scale product able to harvest a rich set of traffic statistics from Cisco IOS NetFlow and IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) enabled routers and switches. ReporterAnalyzer continues to be recognized as the industry standard for NetFlow monitoring and traffic analysis in Global 4000 enterprises.

NetQoS also helped the integrator safely shut down its old network by helping the IT operations staff know which traffic should be migrated to the new network and which should not. One challenge: because the infrastructure had been around for quite some time without usage visibility, the IT operations team was not sure about what constituted unauthorized usage. For customers whose traffic was not to be migrated, the team needed to notify them that the old network was to be shut down. For new traffic, they wanted to be able to ensure the migration was complete and that no traffic was still flowing on old links prior to shutdown.

For this part of the project, ReporterAnalyzer gave the IT operations team the following abilities:

Link analysis – for identifying exactly who is talking to whom, to avoid inadvertently cutting off key customers
Traffic analysis composition and source – for understanding exactly what traffic was to be moved, what traffic was not to be moved, and what had been moved successfully
Change impact analysis – for understanding how traffic had migrated and spotting problems requiring clean-up

ReporterAnalyzer helped the IT operations team make informed decisions that prevented errors and preserved customer confidence in the company.

Providing Proactive Monitoring to Support a Fast-Growing Business

For a leading outsourcer, NetQoS created a new strategy that would help the company deliver better service levels to customers and fix problems faster using fewer engineering and operations resources. NetQoS placed a highly automated configuration of the NetQoS Performance Center at strategic locations within the outsourcer’s operations.

The configuration integrated three NetQoS modules: NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer, for traffic analysis; NetQoS SuperAgent, for end-to-end performance monitoring based on the user experience; and NetQoS GigaStor, for long-term packet capture and retrospective traffic analysis. The three modules are tightly integrated, enabling highly granular, “hands-off” monitoring of the environment from a central location.

The solution also uses matrix switches at each location, which collapse data from many access layers and switches and redirect traffic to the configuration. This enables visibility to any areas experiencing degradation without the outsourcer having to move or deploy additional equipment.

The NetQoS solution provides the outsourcer with the following capabilities:

Baselining – always-on, passive monitoring of traffic at a granular level, against baselines that are automatically established at deployment
Problem isolation and troubleshooting – automatic notification of problems (proactive alarming) and initiation of root-cause analysis, with drill-down to problem components
Advanced response-time analytics – detection not only of problems in monitored applications but also of anomalies that may affect non-monitored applications, enhancing the ability to solve complex problems quickly
Proactive, cost-effective monitoring – by concentrating the product deployments at key points in the network, NetQoS was able to help the outsourcer have deep insight into its entire environment without the expense of instrumenting every application, server and network connection for performance
Ability to see the performance of any transaction in the data center at any time.

With the NetQoS Performance Center, the IT operations team is able to take a more proactive approach to monitoring, and quickly fix problems that could degrade application performance. As a result, the outsourcer has been able to improve application delivery for its customers and reduce SLA violations.

How NetQoS Can Benefit Your Business

1. Respond to the Evolving Needs and Opportunities of Your Business and Customers’ Businesses

Scale infrastructure with confidence, to meet increased traffic and more endpoints
Deploy new applications with ease, even in the largest global environments
Maintain performance amidst application and infrastructure changes

2. Control Infrastructure Costs as You Grow

Forecast expansion requirements accurately – don’t under- or over-provision
Easily accommodate customer additions and changes
Improve decision making and validation regarding what changes to make (WAN optimization or application acceleration, for example) to improve performance and security

3. Proactively Troubleshoot Network and Application Problems

Shorten mean time to repair (MTTR) and mitigate risk
Eliminate the “blame game” among vendors by isolating problems more quickly

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