Archive of posts: 'Networking Technology' category

With employees at home, the requirements on IT to troubleshoot residential and last-mile ISP network issues is growing, even as inherent visibility into these networks remains lacking. At AppNeta, our active monitoring provides insight into employees’ local networks and last-mile ISP performance to help IT quickly understand the root cause of performance issues. So if that root cause is with...

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The start of the school year can be daunting under any circumstances. But for students in Northwest Florida, this fall marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Michael, one of the most damaging hurricanes on record and the first Category 5 to reach the U.S. mainland since 1992. For many in this corner of the state, memories of the Michael are...

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We’ve quietly been releasing more features for DNS monitoring in AppNeta Performance Manager and it’s about time we talked about all of them in one place. Survival of the fastest DNS is built around the fastest responses, but AppNeta allows you to monitor every server and every response to ensure that a single quick response is not masking deeper issues...

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Any major network – especially a highly distributed one – that fails to change with the times is bound to pay a price. And while concepts like digital transformation are generally applied to industry verticals in the quest for greater business outcomes (and ultimately profits), the same principles can be applied to the sphere of education as a means to...

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We’ve said it before and we’ll keep on saying it: Undertaking any changes–big or small–to your network without having a data-driven strategy is a recipe for failure. But the message to date seems to be falling on deaf ears at many mature finance and telecom companies, as fewer than 35 percent of the IT leaders in this sector rely on...

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Consumers are well aware of how connected technologies are speeding up the delivery of goods and services, enabling new and diverse methods for communication and even breaking down the geographical barriers to where and how they work. But when it comes to the production of those goods consumers can order with just a few taps on their smartphone (and even...

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Think remote work is just a passing fad? Take a look at the businesses popping up in support of the concept, and you might be convinced otherwise. Take, for example, Pizzatime, a new service from digital agency Planetary that organizes virtual pizza parties for teams collaborating from multiple branch locations. Leveraging Slack, the tool takes orders from each team member...

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Every sector faces unique roadblocks on their path to the cloud. In life sciences, however, the stakes of executing a successful digital transformation can literally be life or death, and protecting patients and their data has always been a top concern when adopting new technology. In that same vein, however, a reluctance to innovate or deploy technologies that can speed...

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According to a recent Salesforce report, 71 percent of enterprise IT teams are transforming from “a technology-providing cost center to a value-based service brokerage.” What does that mean exactly? For starters, the IT department of the past was very much a reactionary operation. That’s not to say that IT teams were always playing catch up, but actually the opposite: The...

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According to the latest figures from the Commerce Department, online shopping has overtaken grocery stores and restaurants in terms of retail market share to become the second largest category in this sector, trailing only vehicle and auto parts sales in the United States as of this June. As to be expected, a great deal of the surge in popularity for...

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Since the earliest days of Silicon Valley, competing tech companies have always been engaged in a virtual arms race for loyal users. Whether it’s PC versus Mac, or AWS versus Azure, there always seem to be at least two dueling behemoths involved whenever a new technology takes the scene. As we’ve covered in recent posts, communication software seems to be...

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Despite the fact that the United States’ healthcare system is among the world’s most expensive, it ranks at the bottom of developed nations where efficiency and effectiveness are concerned. That’s because not unlike in finance, where customer experience has been the primary benefactor of digital transformation initiatives, healthcare tech has been slow to transform where back-office operations are concerned. At...

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We’ve recently touched upon how digital transformation has been making a serious impact across industries, from the previously cloud-averse financial sector down to the assembly line. Retail, however, is one industry that’s perhaps felt the burn (and the boon, ie. Amazon, WalMart, Wayfair) of digital transformation more than any other. But while retailers have been credited with evolving in response...

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Between The Master’s and The Women’s World Cup, sports fans have had a lot of mid-day distractions lately. And while it’s not a sport in the traditional sense, the impending Democratic presidential debates present yet another heated competition that is likely to have many office workers switching back-and-forth between live streams over the coming months. Mixing work and politics is...

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According to our 2019 State of Enterprise IT report, “brand damage” is one of the biggest impacts of poor end-user experience. If you needed an example of what this looks like in action, look no further than Target’s recent string of bad luck and the ensuing social media fallout. On Sunday, June 16th, the company experienced an outage that impacted...

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A recent Accenture survey of enterprise tech pros found that only one third of companies that have undergone cloud migration are reaping the expected results. The report, which received feedback from roughly 200 IT pros, emphasizes a “tale as old as time” about adopting any kind of new technology or workflow: Expectations can quickly get inflated when they aren’t rooted...

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Days 2 and 3 at Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego were jam-packed with activity for the AppNeta team. Look no further than Senior Sales Director Mike Mattei’s viral picture from the show floor for proof: Check out Mike Mattei breaking a sweat at #CLUS 2019 in San Diego! Come visit Mike and the rest of the AppNeta team at...

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The opening keynote from Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins started by pointing out that this was the company’s 30th year hosting a version Cisco Live, emphasizing just how much has changed in the tech world since the conference was born in 1989 as “Networkers.” (Shoutout to our intern @JarrettLee828 for leveraging that bit of knowledge for a prize during the show)...

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Google recently published an eye-opening report that looked at the impact of remote work on large organizations, a topic the behemoth search engine-cum-tech monolith is well suited to explore. After all, according to the company, at least 30 percent of all meetings held between employees involve at least two time zones. That makes sense when you consider that 2 in...

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According to the findings of our 2019 State of Enterprise IT report, only 53.5% of all enterprises are knowingly employing a network performance monitoring solution. That means that despite the fact that enterprises the world over are, by and large, overhauling their legacy networks to embrace enterprise decentralization, only about half of IT teams are even sure they have a...

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When the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went live a year ago, companies across the globe were bracing for the sky to fall. And while there were certainly some headline-grabbing fines for noncompliance (most notably, Google’s almost 50 million Euro hit this past January related to “forced consent”), the mandate’s first year was far less “doom and gloom”...

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According to a recent report from Gartner, anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of enterprise app spending takes place “in the shadows” -- that is, without the knowledge of enterprise IT, and potentially in violation of network policies. Known as “Shadow IT,” the rogue use of apps that leverage WAN capacity has exploded alongside the widespread adoption of SaaS for...

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The financial sector has been notoriously averse to embracing the scale of digital transformation that has transformed other industries from the top-down (think Industry 4.0, IoT in Healthcare, virtual dressing rooms, etc.). While banks of all sizes have adopted cloud computing for non-core functions, many still rely on legacy, hardware-defined workflows when it comes to business-critical operations and customer transactions....

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Last week, the AppNeta team traveled down to Dallas for ONUG Spring 2019, where we met with other leaders in the enterprise networking space to discuss the challenges and solutions organizations face as they put connected technologies front-and-center. The agenda for the event zeroed in on Digital Transformation in particular, which, as a concept, can be loaded. As we’ve discussed...

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Remote work is by no means a new concept, but recent high-profile announcements suggest that this model is fast graduating from “a novel approach” to an operational standard across industries. At Facebook’s recent F8 2019 developer conference, for instance, Stripe, a tech platform that builds economic infrastructure for web companies, announced that the company would be opening up a fifth...

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While consensus over what digital transformation actually means still appears to elude many members of the C-Suite, enterprise investment into the concept has never been higher, according to a recent report from IDC. Across virtually every industry and sector, total spending on digital transformation will jump roughly 18 percent in 2019 to a new high-water mark of $1.18 trillion. Gearing...

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Network monitoring solutions, by design, should help bring clarity into your management stack. Armed with this clarity, your team can start taking rote tasks out of your day-to-day to help streamline network management from the ground up. Every convenience we can provide -- no matter the scale -- to help speed up deployment or make AppNeta Performance Manager easier to...

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The 2019 State of IT Report from Spiceworks is out, and, as we could’ve predicted, upgrading outdated network infrastructure is the leading enterprise IT investment for the next year among leaders surveyed. Eighty-nine percent of those polled (which included IT execs across North America and Europe) expect their IT budgets to grow over the next 12 months. Stateside, many leaders...

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Cloud-based call centers have gone from risky experiments to a business standard over the course of the last decade. According to research from IDG, 62.4 percent of global enterprises now use cloud (or virtual) contact centers to facilitate their customer service and outreach operations, and for good reason. For starters, this reflects an overall trend of enterprise decentralization, where companies...

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In an age when “appointment television” is a nearly-dead concept (outside of Game of Thrones at least), people still go out of their way to make sure they catch their favorite team or player live. We’ve seen it firsthand here at AppNeta. Take the latest Masters Tournament: Ahead of Tiger Woods taking home his first title trophy in over a...

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According to the Cloud Adoption and Risk Report 2019 from McAfee, cloud usage grew 15 percent last year, establishing a new high-water mark for enterprise adoption. The average enterprise now employs roughly 1,935 cloud apps, with business applications (ie. Google Drive, Office 365 or Salesforce) accounting for 70 percent of total cloud services. (This may seem high, but McAfee likely...

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Buckle up, IT pros, and move over SDN: Intent-based networking (IBN) is the latest approach to network management that’s buzzing in the enterprise space. While this acronym may not be as familiar as others that have come to define IT ops and digital transformation (think SD-WAN and SaaS), it’s not actually an entirely new approach. In fact, IBN shares a...

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For years, the center of gravity within the tech sector has been squarely located in Silicon Valley, the storied West Coast home of Apple, Alphabet, and pretty much every other tech behemoth you can imagine (with a few notable exceptions like Amazon). As a result, tech workers have notoriously fled competing job markets in the hopes of landing gigs in...

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When monitoring an enterprise network, teams often think that they need to focus squarely on the apps that are deemed “business critical,” and little else. While the logic here isn’t flawed, per se, this approach robs IT of the holistic picture of network conditions they need to truly understand where their network capacity is being spent. Without this full picture...

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A new report from EMA, a leading IT and data management research group, found that roughly 75 percent of network managers polled think their network performance monitoring (NPM) tools are “insufficient” when it comes to the public cloud. Barely a quarter of those polled believe the tools they currently use fully address their monitoring needs where cloud monitoring is concerned,...

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IPv4, the previous and still prevalent generation of the Internet Protocol, was designed to support roughly 4.3 billion devices. While this was plenty of capacity for the connected world of 1980, it’s tiny by 2019 standards. While it’s not yet true that every one of the planet’s 7 billion people is armed with their own connected devices, it’s increasingly true...

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The Facebook outage that impacted the company’s globally-popular suite of social media apps last week certainly caused lots of headaches. But reports that the interruptions were due to issues on the network level proved premature. Facebook operates its own collection of 15 data centers globally, which serve as a redundant, internal backbone network. As a result, the public doesn’t readily...

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Enterprise IT and network ops teams may not appear to have much in common with the names on your NCAA March Madness bracket. But in both arenas, teams need to be masters of strategy, cooperation, and fast thinking in order to succeed. That’s because just like college basketball, network monitoring and management requires having both a strong offense and defense....

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The World Wide Web turned 30 years old this month, and like any Millennial entering their third decade, there were plenty of cringeworthy moments along the way. While the growth of widespread connectivity has undoubtedly helped change our day-to-day reality since it was invented in 1989, even the Web’s “parents” are uneasy about some of the changes. In an open...

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The rate of change in the hospitality sector over the past decade has been staggering. While booking apps, AirBnB, and ratings websites have certainly been disruptors, it’s really the changing demands of travelers that have put technology at the center of the lodging experience. And hoteliers are taking note. A recent study from Forrester Research found that of all the...

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Hot on the heels of our recently introduced DNS monitoring capabilities, we’re excited to announce that we’ve enhanced AppNeta Performance Manager’s Route Visualization capabilities with BGP data, adding greater context to the insights within the platform’s Delivery dashboard. Our new Route Visualization brings you the big picture. You can see how DNS, content delivery networks, and BGP work together to...

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It’s not just enterprise networks that are feeling the impact of digital transformation. From government agencies to higher education, cloud migration and SaaS adoption are changing networking from the top-down, and putting unprecedented strain on IT departments as a result. One recent incident at Amherst College in Massachusetts illustrated perfectly what can happen when IT gets buried under an avalanche...

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There’s no denying that the SD-WAN market is having a moment. After sliding into the Trough of Disillusionment on the 2017 Gartner Hype Cycle, SD-WAN was firmly on the Slope of Enlightenment for 2018, and continues to build both momentum and advocacy as the decade comes to a close. What’s attractive about SD-WAN is that it doesn’t force teams to...

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Delivering visibility is central to everything we do at AppNeta. Not only does our platform allow enterprise IT to see into all corners of their network, but transparency and clarity is central to how we operate as a company, too. It’s fitting, therefore, that AppNeta was named a Visionary in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and...

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AppNeta Performance Manager provides several ways for customers to integrate monitoring data with other systems, including the RESTful API Observer endpoint that allows you to send event notifications to your own receiver. With this ability, the opportunity for flexible integration abounds. In a past post, I looked at how to integrate AppNeta Performance Manager events into Slack channels. Justin previously...

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While you’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary networking pro who still refers to the Internet as the “Information Superhighway,” the metaphor isn’t totally off-base. The Internet as we know it, after all, is a massive dynamic network of pathways that connect a global collection of enterprise- or ISP-owned Autonomous Systems (AS). Data travels over the Internet like cars...

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It’s a foregone conclusion that the future of enterprise business rests in the cloud. This is especially true when considering what a huge role cloud migration has played within the enterprise space over just the past few years: Spending on cloud computing has grown at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009, and is expected to grow at...

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Thanks in no small part to the widespread adoption of cloud technology, many of the biggest enterprise success stories of the recent past revolve around a business’ ability to support a distributed workforce. The benefits of this model are easy to see: Teams aren’t confined to the four walls of a central office, which opens up the pool of talent...

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The primary aim of digital transformation -- a phrase that lacks a clear definition, but encompasses swapping out legacy tech for the latest cloud apps -- is to streamline processes across the enterprise. There’s the promise of faster solutions, more connectivity between remote offices, and the ability for business to scale up with ease (and at minimal cost). Done successfully,...

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Enterprise IT and end users alike tend to take the Domain Name System (DNS) for granted. While those who don’t work in network operations might not even know what DNS is -- let alone the central role it plays in making the Internet a space humans can navigate -- even IT often just expects the system to always perform. DNS...

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Before the days of personal computing -- and well before the dawn of smart devices -- it was easier for the relatively few users leveraging the Internet to recognize familiar IP addresses, like memorizing a home phone number in the pre-caller ID days. While we may type URLs into search bars and click “Send” on email, computers don’t actually read...

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Trust is a central component of any company’s digital transformation. When offloading processes and applications that used to be managed in-house to SaaS providers, businesses have to be comfortable sharing data that historically was kept close to vest. This is especially true when it comes to performance monitoring solutions built to analyze all network traffic (even just packet headers). Without...

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IN PRACTICE | This article is part of a series of posts sharing examples of how AppNeta users have leveraged the service to solve performance problems. Continuous, real-time visibility into the condition of the core network is crucial to ensure consistent performance for end users. Without network visibility, problems may go undetected until they are severe enough to negatively impact...

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IN PRACTICE | This article is part of a series of posts sharing examples of how AppNeta users have leveraged the service to solve performance problems. Since business class networks are expensive, it’s important for the organizations that use them to have visibility into how they are used so they can make informed decisions. If the network becomes oversaturated, do...

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The basic principle of net neutrality, which prohibited internet service providers from throttling speeds or intentionally blocking content, applications or websites, is no longer our reality. Now we’re left to wonder, as bandwidth-hungry applications and connected devices exponentially increase global IP traffic, set to reach 3.3 ZB per year by 2021, what will ISPs do with their free reign of...

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We have a tendency to take WiFi networks for granted. As consumers, we don’t think about the logistics of WiFi—we just want to watch Netflix without constant buffering. The same expectation carries over for employees using business applications. They don’t care what’s going on with the WiFi in the background. They just want seamless access to applications and services necessary...

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The complexity of choosing and managing cloud long-term leads to tough decisions for most modern enterprises. One industry expert notes that choosing cloud doesn’t have to be the default for enterprise IT teams. Some applications just aren’t cloud-compatible and may never be. An on-premises virtual environment might be a better fit for a mission-critical application. Cloud platforms depend on the...

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Public internet access has little appeal when it comes to mission-critical cloud connections. High latency, low bandwidth and patchy speeds depending on location are just a few hurdles that companies must endure. Here are a few ways you can troubleshoot your public cloud connections and improve cloud access for business applications: 1. Just Build a WAN! Most enterprises don’t connect...

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Subscription-based options just keep growing, as music, movies and TV, along with your business-critical SaaS apps, are all available now with various monthly payment methods. IT continues to move in this direction too, with network subscription packages the latest trend. Unlike software applications, networking still requires physical parts. But the idea of SDN and a pay-as-you-go, network as a service...

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Many businesses are supporting remote locations, which include any office or location that doesn’t have its own data center and connects to a company data center over a network—LAN, WAN or public internet. Scaling to these locations means that network types are expanding too. Plus, application infrastructure is becoming distributed. SaaS and cloud providers host their apps from a huge...

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Just last summer, we published a post that discussed the differences between SD-WAN and WAN optimization. At the time, many people were simplifying the discussion and wondering if SD-WAN could replace aging WAN optimization solutions. When you break down the purposes of each technology, the two look more like a dynamic duo than a replacement for one another. But times...

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There are plenty of shiny new technologies available to enterprise IT teams today. The network underpins business infrastructure, and it’s key to making all these new applications and tools work smoothly. But most businesses don’t have the luxury of starting over with an entirely cloud-driven, SaaS-based infrastructure. In some way or another, they’re stuck with legacy tools. IT teams have...

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As new, exciting technologies become reality, IT teams are updating systems and considering the best technology options to support new tools. IoT, for example, needs a strong networking foundation. It’s more than just a reliable network that’s needed, but a complex network design that allows for real-time data analysis between and among all the dispersed IoT sensors. That data today...

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From LAN to WAN, WiFi to VoIP, network monitoring is now critical for companies to get the most from their IT infrastructure. The network monitoring market is set to spike as more companies spend IT budget on tools that help keep tabs on network performance. But what really makes the difference? What do the best network monitoring tools have in...

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For a long time, the Internet of Things (IoT) was considered over-hyped. The promises of widespread data collection, transmission and analysis all sounded pretty great, and business leaders across all functions were ready to buy in. But as we enter 2018, IoT is actually here. Deployments have become practical enough to warrant the rise of a new multi-billion-dollar product segment—IoT...

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The cloud/SaaS honeymoon usually ends pretty quickly for IT teams supporting various cloud and SaaS applications. The loss of control over SaaS apps can be a surprise for IT, even as it also frees up time. IT team members are now at the mercy of SaaS application providers, which decide when upgrades will happen and when maintenance windows and planned...

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As part of the sales engineering team here at AppNeta, I see a lot of enterprise networks in action. We solved one interesting mystery recently. I was working with a customer on a proof of concept for our monitoring solution (AppNeta Performance Manager). On February 6, they were unable to attend a call we had set up, due to a...

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How many businesses can say their employees never think twice about technology in the workplace? It’s a question we looked at late last year as end-user experiences become increasingly important for workplace productivity. But unfortunately, business applications of all kinds experience performance hits on a daily basis. As a result, we’ve seen the market for end-user experience monitoring grow significantly...

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If you’re keeping up with application development trends lately, you may have heard the term “progressive web apps” come up. This concept of progressive apps is a new type of web app standard that aims to make web apps more like native applications. These aren’t entirely brand-new, written-from-scratch applications, but are instead improved over time—progressively—with modern features. The result is...

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Here’s a helpful explainer on intent-based networking, which we’ve heard a lot about from Cisco in the past year or so. The idea of intent-based networking is essentially to bring a kind of automation to networking, but an automation that takes into account the complexity and rigged-together nature of many networks. Intent-based networking aims to model ideal outcomes rather than...

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The Linux Foundation recently announced the LF Networking Fund to combine the multiple open source projects it’s got in the works. These include Open Daylight, Open Platform for NFV and the Open Network Automation Platform, among others. Part of this initiative includes standardizing projects on a single architecture and processes. These various projects in development may bring interesting new technology...

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The WAN used to be controlled by hardware switches and physical cabling. Although this is still the case in many companies, a number of businesses have set up something entirely new—a fully programmable WAN. This is an upheaval. It brings many changes to the discipline of information technology, such as: How architects design their networks How companies procure network hardware...

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The deep packet inspection market is expected to experience substantial growth over the next four years, but what’s driving corporate interest? The technology itself is straightforward: Instead of simply examining packet headers, deep packet inspection (DPI) goes deeper to analyze the contents of any packet passing through specific checkpoints—typically firewalls—and can make real-time decisions about what happens to these packets...

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If you take a peek at the telecom world, you see a couple of big networking trends that are making waves there. However, changes are still slow to come, since network managers have a lot of legacy networks and infrastructure in place now. Ripping and replacing is expensive, time-consuming and risky. This expert thinks 2020 will be the year of...

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IT ROLE: Network engineer for branch and wireless services NEEDS: Monitoring 500 remote locations with a small, centralized IT team RESULTS: Finding provider issues; creating network performance baselines We talked recently with a customer who runs AppNeta at a large and growing healthcare provider. This network engineer has just one other colleague helping to manage and monitor 500 locations around...

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SD-WAN was originally designed to be the successor technology to MPLS networks, but it doesn’t appear to have worked out that way. Research from Nemertes has shown that nearly 80% of companies with a pre-existing MPLS deployment retain the technology after SD-WAN adoption. Clearly there is some synergy between SD-WAN and MPLS. How does an older technology co-exist with a...

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Software-defined architecture is the next big thing for networks, allowing companies to shift away from costly, inflexible hardware to more agile and adaptable solutions. Consider software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN), which some experts see as the natural replacement of multi-protocol label-switching (MPLS) solutions currently in use. There’s some justification for this position, since SD-WAN offers reduced costs and greater flexibility....

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Is SaaS sprawl creeping in to your enterprise environment? Orchestration might be a good goal for 2018. Building an orchestration environment means that IT’s resources, services and workflows are available to users in a self-service way. So for cloud deployments, a cloud orchestration system means that there’s a specific workflow to follow when a business user requests a common task,...

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When companies move ahead on implementing ServiceNow, it's not just for a better ticketing system. The SaaS application claims to replace unstructured work patterns with intelligent workflows, improve service levels, energize employees and enable enterprises to work at light speed. That’s a tall order, even for a powerful platform that automates and connects workflows and disconnected databases. While the appeal...

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Cooperative of seven family-owned businesses 260 stores in 26 states Annual revenue of more than $2.8 billion The corporate network team at Bon-Ton Stores is responsible for the wireless guest networks at all 260 of the company’s stores, along with the applications that employees use every day. After they rolled out new guest WiFi networks in all of their stores,...

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On the road toward software-defined everything, WAN virtualization could play an important part. SDN is useful for a lot of data center networking tasks, like switching. But SDN across existing IP networks doesn’t necessarily bring a lot of value, and many businesses wouldn’t be able to afford to invest in entirely new software-defined networks. SD-WAN, though, has emerged as a...

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The internet and rise of mobility mean that business users and the information systems they rely on are rarely in the same place any more. Users depend on their own devices, virtualization means their desktop isn't always on their desktop, applications run remotely and even simple telecom services are delivered via the internet. In addition, API-based services, big data and...

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We’ve come so far with our phones in just a few years. At home, landlines are becoming obsolete, and at work, the old hardwired phones have been replaced by sleeker new VoIP models. The benefits to users of using VoIP are mostly apparent when employees want to make calls from anywhere, to anywhere, even halfway around the world. The benefits...

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The fall ONUG conference a few weeks back explored lots of emerging networking technology and trends. Here’s a good look into some of those, including network infrastructure consolidation, where SD-WAN functionality is packaged into a larger product that also offers routing, security and other features. Then there’s automation, which one expert argues is the only way for businesses to get...

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As more enterprises move their applications and services to the cloud, we see a clearer focus on ensuring good application performance for users. That’s beneficial for end users and for organizations focused on DevOps and apps. And it’s a smart business decision—just look at recent APM provider acquisition data to see the size of this industry. Application teams want to...

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Supplier of test, measurement and control solutions Used by engineers and scientists Headquartered in Austin, TX 35,000 global customers; annual revenue of $1.23 billion NI’s Network and Application Challenges The IT networking team at National Instruments ensures the network paths for users are optimized and can handle the traffic between offices and the outside world. They’d been experiencing performance issues...

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As predicted, it’s prediction time for 2018! The year ahead will bring more technology advancements, and also advancements for the people using that technology as they figure out what will work best for their users. Cloud infrastructures come in a lot of different flavors these days, but they all need to perform well and consistently if they're going to succeed....

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You know what happens this time of year, as Halloween is approaching: It’s time for next year’s technology predictions to arrive. Here, there's a look at some potential 2018 networking trends around SD-WAN in particular. One that caught our attention was the addition of security features like firewall functionality, and the expectation that antivirus and flexible security feature deployment will...

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St. Luke’s University Health Network, founded in 1872, is one of Pennsylvania’s leading healthcare organizations, and is home to the oldest school of nursing in the United States. SLUHN is the fastest-growing hospital system in Pennsylvania. That fast growth means new challenges for the healthcare IT team at St. Luke's, specifically the network engineering team, led by Bryan Smith and Mandy...

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With ONUG Fall 2017 coming up next week, we’re taking a moment to reflect on some of the big network changes and trends of the year. So many parts of IT infrastructure are now overlapping, and networking technology is the glue that holds it all together. New demands on the network, with SaaS, cloud and now IoT in the picture,...

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Disbelief is a common theme in our demo process with potential customers. When we use AppNeta Performance Manager to show a customer their own data for a particular office, they almost immediately ask why the capacity metrics are low. If the customer is paying for 250 Mbps out of that office, why is AppNeta only showing them 46 Mbps? The...

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We’ve got a lot of interesting, forward-thinking customers here at AppNeta, and one network engineer at a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) vendor recently told us about his proactive IT team and company’s efficient support setup. It really embodies the new way that IT teams are thinking about people and process to meet user needs. For this company, a...

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Traceroute is a basic network investigation tool that every IT professional has used for simple network troubleshooting. It tracks the path of an IP network packet from source to destination by sending packets marked with a TTL value (or hop count) that increments for each transmission. It can give you a rough idea of the route from the user to...

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Here’s a great recent look at the top challenges that IT teams are facing, courtesy of a survey done at VMworld. We’re not surprised to see that performance was named as the top challenge, with 38% of respondents choosing it. We hear daily about the pressures on IT to provide good performance, and the obstacles they have to clear to...

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Technology is becoming increasingly commoditized as consumerization of IT permeates all industries. Now, business leaders are turning to customer experience to help differentiate them from competitors. But even as so much attention is paid to the customer experience, there’s another experience that is often overlooked—the internal end-user experience. At the same time end-user experience is becoming front-and-center, cloud-based applications are...

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We heard recently from one of our customers about how they’ve been using AppNeta’s performance monitoring at their company, a healthcare support organization. (They’ll remain nameless here.) The key application our customer, the head of IT, is supporting is the electronic health record system for hundreds of hospitals and doctors’ offices. Reliability, efficiency and security are obviously the top goals...

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Which approach is your company taking with MPLS? This breakdown covers the various use cases that might drive the SD-WAN vs. MPLS decision. Remote locations with a lot of streaming business-critical applications (VoIP call centers, maybe) will still likely need MPLS to keep performance strong. But for cloud-driven companies, SD-WAN products that are cloud-enabled can be a win. As the...

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Metrics are meaningless. Well, that's not quite true. Raw metrics, when it comes to IT monitoring, are just numbers that don't tell you anything. A number may seem high, but not result in any problem visible to end users. Another number may seem low, but not be as low as SLAs require. The only way to make metrics meaningful is...

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Apple’s latest OS—iOS 11—launches tomorrow. With half to two-thirds of device users running iOS 10, reflecting the huge base of iPhone users, this is no small event for corporate networks. Users bring their devices to work as a matter of course, whether they use them a little or a lot for actual work. So while users are eager for new...

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Scripting a web browser to imitate a human (otherwise known as automated synthetic web transactions) is awesome. Seriously—it’s an amazingly flexible and useful tool. Web developers can script against an application for testing purposes. For those figuring out how to scale a web application, you can use scripts to bring massive amounts of load to an app and see where...

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We always like to hear the stories of those IT early adopters for a new technology. In this story, it’s several heads of IT who’ve adopted SD-WAN. For both, their companies needed a better way to provision and manage branch office infrastructure. For one, the Bay Club Company, using SD-WAN is actually helping IT drive revenue. Provisioning new locations is...

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Here’s a bold statement: AppNeta is simply the best solution for monitoring modern web applications and the networks that deliver them. The simple truth is that traditional monitoring tools aren’t designed to provide visibility into applications delivered via the WAN, whether they are internal or third-party SaaS apps. But AppNeta was designed from the ground up to solve this vexing...

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There are plenty of varieties of network monitoring these days, and various ways it’s used. The reason for using it, however, is fairly singular: to see and improve end-user experience. Network monitoring can ensure that the network has been running well, is running well currently and will continue to run well in the future, regardless of corporate circumstance. Capacity monitoring...

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The adoption curve for technology (what Gartner calls the Hype Cycle) is interesting to watch for various products. As SD-WAN matures, we start to see differentiation between products and types of deployment. This story has a useful breakdown of the SD-WAN choices IT teams can make, whether they install it on-premises only, in a cloud-enabled way, or a cloud-enabled way...

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Who doesn’t love data these days? For business leaders, the more data you can collect, the better. Some might resist certain technologies in digital transformation, but it seems everyone can agree that big data analytics makes business life easier. Everyone except IT leaders, that is. While business leaders add ever-increasing data inputs with IoT sensors, IT teams are left to...

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SD-WAN is gaining traction quickly with a lot of businesses. If SD-WAN technology is on your radar, you likely want to improve the performance of networks and applications at remote offices. You may have jumped off the SD-WAN adoption cliff already, or are at least researching and considering it. With SD-WAN’s popularity, it has gained a silver bullet quality. It does...

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It’s always fun to stop and take a look at network traffic during specific events when the web is especially in demand—during the Olympics, World Cup, March Madness or whatever your office’s preference is. Here’s a look at how this week’s solar eclipse affected the internet—specifically carrier networks. Lots of good eclipse viewing areas were in rural areas, so the...

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There was a time when the consumerization of IT struck fear in the hearts of any network manager. It was easier to push back and deny or ignore iPhones in the workplace than to actually revamp the network to support them—not to mention prepare for the onslaught of cyber threats that came along with them. But that was years ago....

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In an era gone by, IT teams mostly worked on hardware and software—strictly the technology part of IT. Buying the tools that the business needed was mostly a one-off annual purchase, or maybe more frequent if new products were needed. IT teams spent time interacting with vendors or systems integrators, but it was fairly transactional. Today, IT teams still decide...

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Either WAN optimization is dead, or it’s more important than ever. This story argues that WAN optimization reached its peak in the era of limited bandwidth. Now, though, the technology has lost its usefulness because it can’t improve VoIP or video streaming application performance. On the other hand, this analyst says that WAN optimization should be a no-brainer when using...

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No one would blame you if you can’t muster up much enthusiasm for IPv6. After all, IPv6 has been “the future” of internet protocols since its inception in 1998, without much evidence it's happening. Even though you’ve been reading about the impending downfall of IPv4 since 2007, here we are in 2017 watching adoption just barely creep above 20%. You...

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Why does it matter so much that enterprise users have a good experience with the technology they use every day? Well, their productivity has a big impact on the business’s bottom line. Fewer complaints from users means fewer calls and help desk tickets for IT to manage. And today’s cloud and SaaS-based technology can be really efficient and useful when...

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The need for collaboration tools like chat and video apps is greater than ever, for a few big reasons: Businesses are increasing their numbers of remote locations quickly Companies have recognized that it’s important to hire the best talent regardless of location. Employees often travel on business or choose to work remotely. Customers and suppliers are actively involved in the design of...

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More healthcare organizations are discovering SD-WAN technology for help managing their many remote locations. It makes a lot of sense—in many ways, healthcare businesses like hospitals and home healthcare facilities are the poster children of the challenges of modern networking. Each remote office or location needs high-performing networks and applications, and most don’t have IT teams on site. We’ve heard...

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Just as you’re starting to get comfortable with the cloud, IT reporters may have you thinking there’s a new wave about to replace it—edge computing. And as the Internet of Things takes hold in the workplace, moving processing power to the edge will certainly be important. However, there aren’t many businesses that are prepared to revamp their entire organizations for...

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A recent survey from Dimensional Research found that nearly all respondents are facing multiple WAN security and management challenges. Network complexity is the underlying challenge for most respondents, which they’re aware of, but not addressing. The top three challenges all involve supporting branch offices: Managing devices, mitigating security risks and deploying new solutions at branch offices. It’s not a surprise,...

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What would happen if we woke up tomorrow and WiFi didn’t exist anymore? It would take some getting used to, for sure. You could fall back on your carrier’s mobile service, but it’s not quite the same as the comfort of your personal WiFi network. For years now, proposals have surfaced about the possibility of universal, free WiFi. It sounds...

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“Help, I need somebody!” That refrain from one of the songs that powered the Beatles to long-ago pop music success is the perpetual lament of anyone who’s ever run into a brick wall at work with computer or hardware, WiFi access, or a host of other potentially challenging activities. For years, the IT support help desk has been the answer....

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Today, there is a lot of effort toward speeding up cloud-hosted app performance through the use of solutions like SD-WAN, but not enough attention afforded to the so-called last mile of these connections. This last mile is the final network step that gets data coming into a particular office to the user requesting that data. For IT teams managing any...

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For every new technology, there’s that initial excitement that makes you think “this is the innovation that will break the Gartner Hype Cycle.” But time and time again, there’s a gap between innovation hype and practical implementation. There’s no better example of this gap than the case of software-defined networking (SDN). The concept has been around since the mid-1990s, but...

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Emerging technologies are making it easier for IT teams to manage the remote offices under their control. SD-WAN deployment is growing quickly, and so are remote locations, which are increasingly a part of many distributed businesses in a whole variety of industries. At its simplest, SD-WAN pairs multiple existing networks and routes their traffic depending on network health or specific...

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Check out this research showing how digital transformation is affecting companies with remote and branch offices. The EMA Research study found that 83% of enterprises are increasing their number of WAN-connected sites, and in 84% of enterprises, the number of network-connected devices is also increasing at remote sites. A majority of businesses surveyed—74%—are also making changes around using the internet...

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Whether you’re just starting to learn the basics or you’re researching more specific benefits, you can’t go far without seeing stories about SD-WAN technology. The market for SD-WAN solutions is set to explode and IT publishers are feeding the hype. Sometimes, you might just want to sit back and ignore the hype. You have plenty of other innovative technologies to...

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Monitoring the performance of your infrastructure is a worthy and necessary part of any IT environment. Whether you have one office or thousands, knowing the status of your equipment is important. However, many of the applications we depend on today are delivered over networks owned by carriers. Accessing your email, for example, likely routes through a few hops in the...

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Have you joined the rising crowd of IT pros claiming WAN optimization is dead in recent years? It’s the same story with all types of technology at this point. You spend 10 or 20 years relying on yesterday’s innovation, and as soon as something new comes along, the industry is ready to move on. For many, SD-WAN seems like the...

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One of our favorite topics around here is obviously network performance. This take on upgrading network performance looks at the big picture of networking today to see where improvements might happen. Throughput and security have traditionally been the two big considerations in network performance, but others now include policy-based approaches, flexible infrastructure and capacity. The general outlook here is that...

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The value of application performance monitoring is increasing as apps move to the cloud and SaaS providers. There are many factors that can affect application performance, including local network congestion, ISP performance, inefficient routes, server-side infrastructure and a multitude of others. But there is an even more prevalent change occurring at the other end of the application delivery path: The...

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Are you using multicloud in your enterprise? No? Are you sure about that? This look at multicloud notes that many businesses are actually using multicloud without knowing it, citing an IDC study that 95% of businesses are using multiple public and private clouds. This unknown use of multicloud is a sort of outgrowth of shadow IT, which isn’t so harmless...

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It may have seemed for a moment there that MPLS was on its way out as SD-WAN came onto the scene and businesses with remote locations used more public internet. That’s probably not the case, though. A recent Nemertes Research survey found that about 21% of organizations are deploying some kind of SD-WAN technology. Notably, though, they aren’t getting rid...

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Determining the health and status of a web application over time is an important task for both provider and end user in today’s highly distributed, SaaS-based world. There are plenty of methods used to monitor applications today, from the simplistic ping approach to a complex in-depth test. Ensuring visibility into performance without breaking the app—or worse, the budget—is a difficult...

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A network outage can be disruptive and expensive, so you want to eliminate the causes. This checklist of the top 10 questions to ask after a network outage can help you identify the reasons for an outage and expose any gaps in your monitoring. Ideally, you’ll learn from an outage to prevent others in the future. In addition to outages,...

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There are two sides to the modern call center argument. You’re either lamenting the decline of phone calls as a means of communication or you’re excited that chat and other types of messaging are taking hold. But regardless where you stand in the conversation, there’s one thing both sides can agree on: It’s best to avoid call centers at all...

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It’s shaping up to be a pleasant afternoon around the office, with no user complaints coming in and the weekend beckoning. Then you get a call from the office manager at one of your company’s remote offices, several hours’ drive from where you are. Their weekly site backup, which should take about 45 minutes, now says it will take 45...

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 Bring your own device (BYOD), digital transformation, consumerization of IT—all of these trends and buzzwords have changed the way enterprises do business. But there’s one IT system that takes the brunt of the pressure from these trends: the WiFi network. It wasn’t too long ago that WiFi networks were a luxury in the workplace. But things change quickly. Today, without...

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The last thing an IT leader needs is more to worry about. Networks are more complicated than ever, and you already have your hands full with new configurations, infrastructure troubleshooting, resource allocation and new tech deployments. But there’s a problem. The business problems you used to let other leaders solve are starting to bleed into IT territory. You aren’t just...

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As businesses continue to migrate from expensive and inflexible MPLS network architectures, software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has emerged as a key technology for managing application and network load over the public internet. It’s particularly good for businesses with a large number of remote locations and an investment in MPLS circuits. What is SD-WAN? Organizations are deploying SD-WAN technology to pair multiple...

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AppNeta’s customer care team is a smart, enthusiastic bunch of colleagues. They’re so good at what they do that it can be easy to forget how lucky we are to have them here at AppNeta. After all, a satisfied customer never needs to talk to anyone up the chain. There are a lot of ways our customers use our AppNeta...

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The age-old bottleneck has plagued IT since the first wired connections were made. Network bottlenecks happen when the communication between network endpoints doesn’t have enough capacity to transfer data without overflowing network constraints. The problem could lie on the internal network, internet WAN or in the destination network, but are no longer commonly in the office. Most offices have a...

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Getting a full picture of applications in use on the network is essential for IT teams today. In the past, NetFlow functionality has been used to see apps in use. NetFlow, and similar technologies like sFlow and jFlow, is typically a router feature that looks at the traffic that's been sent and received, and then sends a summary of the...

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IT teams deploy VPNs to create a secure, private connection over the internet. The VPN is an essential technology in connecting employees to corporate apps when they’re not at the main campus. As remote and branch offices have grown, so has VPN availability and selection. This means that VPN performance is particularly important for employees at remote and branch offices,...

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IT leaders have always had their hands full with ghost issues on-premises. But for businesses that rely on remote and branch offices, monitoring a sprawling network of on-premises equipment introduces even more challenges. That’s why we move to the cloud, right? To help us eliminate truck rolls, improve cost efficiency and centralize management of applications across all locations. When you’ve...

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Talk of IT disasters can spark equal amounts of fear of them happening to us, and gratitude that the big one hasn’t happened to us yet. Network World offers some tips on what not to do when migrating to the cloud to avoid disasters—or, at the very least, grumbling users. They recommend splitting apps into two groups: those that will...

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We’re slowly getting used to cloud and SaaS applications in every area of our lives—including at work. Even huge enterprises are starting to move important business apps to the cloud, like Office 365 and Google Docs. That shift affects IT and end users a lot, as both adjust to using and supporting new, cloud-based tools. Sometimes those SaaS applications lack...

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The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that it actually exists. And whether you’ve realized it or not, cloud services are a problem for your IT department. Even if you feel like you have a solid grasp of cloud technology and the nuances of making a cloud purchase, business leaders don’t share the same confidence. Nearly 80% feel...

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Even for the most seasoned IT pros, the cloud is complicated. It can be difficult just to wrap your head around the many terms and acronyms that make up the cloud dictionary—not to mention actually mastering the technology. Unfortunately, complicated cloud terms are often combined to the point that their meanings are lost in a sea of conflicting opinions. Two...

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We launched AppNeta Performance Manager recently, and after all our excitement over letting the world know about it, we’re getting down to business here with some more details. The best part about our product (yes, we’re biased) is that it truly does cloud application monitoring. It’s what you’ll need in the stage after the excitement of finding and deploying cloud,...

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What’s your bandwidth-consuming vice these days? Maybe March Madness? You’re certainly not alone. Even employees in the very important Pentagon are hooked. The Pentagon’s ISP asked employees to reconsider streaming basketball games in light of the important work their bandwidth is supporting—defending the country and all that. We’re sure they have excellent network monitoring helping the effort to pin down...

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As your business grows, your technology requirements—and likely your physical footprint—will grow along with it. Improving infrastructure often means increased expenses due to additional physical data centers, expanded network capacity and improved server efficiency. Many organizations turn to the cloud as a less costly way to get better technology. Whether you've already made the leap to the cloud or you’re...

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We were pretty excited here at AppNeta when we got the good news that we got high marks from users in Gartner’s Network Performance Monitoring-Diagnostics category. Gartner’s Critical Capabilities research examines how tech users actually choose and interact with the products they need. The resulting Critical Capabilities document matches industry personas with features, functionality, customer requirements, ease of use, ease...

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End-user experience is everything when it comes to facilitating workplace productivity. You could deploy or develop the most powerful applications anyone has ever seen—but they won’t do any good if they offer a poor experience. This is a major reason why applications are moving to SaaS, PaaS and IaaS cloud computing models. The cloud simplifies applications on the back end,...

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There are plenty of technology details that have gone through major changes in the cloud era. One networking detail in particular—tracking and managing quality of service (QoS)—is an essential one to master for modern IT. QoS metrics offer a way to mark traffic prioritization over networks in an attempt to guarantee a certain level of performance. So, QoS priority levels...

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Can you believe it’s only been 4 years since cloud computing really went mainstream? It feels like our businesses have been relying on the cloud for so much longer. However, companies still aren’t 100% in the cloud, and hybrid and multicloud deployments are becoming popular, so choosing the right cloud technology is a constant consideration for IT. When you look...

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Whether you’re part of a large enterprise expanding your footprint, a retailer with multiple brick-and-mortar stores, or a bank with many locations, you likely know all about remote office/branch office (ROBO) problems. Much of the pressure of managing remote offices falls on IT if there are outages, slowdowns or too many end-user complaints. For years, IT departments have dealt with...

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This week, Packet Pushers has some excellent guidance around avoiding short-term networking fixes for application issues—or, as they call them, “stupid network tricks.” The way to avoid those tricks, they say, is to get ahead of the problem by involving IT at the outset of every project. Instead of IT being a place to put blame and fight fires, they...

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Our outlook for the year in technology is pretty rosy. Businesses of all stripes are getting more agile and more cloud-savvy. They’re using SaaS apps and cloud services for all kinds of workloads, discovering new capabilities as cloud technology matures. IT teams are looking at the big picture to help users have better experiences. We hear from customers that they’re...

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Download PathTest, our network capacity testing tool, for free! What is PathTest? PathTest is a free IP-based network capacity testing tool designed with flexibility and accuracy in mind. It allows you to determine the maximum capacity between any two IP-addressable network endpoints using precision packet-flooding techniques to fill up the network delivery path to its absolute maximum capacity. PathTest is...

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In just the past ten or so years, consumer devices have swamped enterprises. Along with those devices have come apps and services and the expectation of ease and convenience from technology. The consumerization of IT is more than just the need to support and monitor personal devices on the enterprise network. It’s a mindset shift among your employees that’s silently...

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Even though mass-market VoIP technology has been available since 2004, adoption rates have proved underwhelming for the last decade. VoIP adoption rates have picked up in recent years, but business-critical use cases such as the call center still seem to lag behind cloud services adoption in other parts of the enterprise. As the era of cloud communications further solidifies, using...

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Happy New Year! We’ve found some interesting news and analysis to kick off 2017. First, networking woes certainly haven’t disappeared. This CIO Insight story and accompanying survey data from networking professionals reflects some crucial concerns for IT networking teams today. For nearly three-quarters of respondents, network changes repeatedly cause performance issues, and 66% say that their network monitoring solution predicts...

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BGP, the border gateway protocol, is a creaky old network routing protocol. It was updated last in 2006, but it still serves a useful purpose. Almost every packet that traverses the internet finds its way from source to destination via BGP routing. This is what BGP was designed for, and while it’s not always the fastest route, it can divert...

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Moving business applications to the cloud seems like the holy grail for maximizing ROI and supporting an increasingly mobile and remote workforce. However, not all cloud migrations are created equal. Microsoft Office 365, in particular, is presenting challenges for enterprise networks. This isn’t like the old days, when IT upgraded one desktop per user to a new version of the...

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As the network has moved from a physical entity to a more abstract one, IT has valiantly kept pace by researching and deploying new network devices and functionality. IT teams have had to shift workloads and mindsets to the cloud and to SaaS providers, while remaining responsible for end-user experience—which is ever more important. But which network metrics can convey...

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Happy Friday! From InformationWeek, we came across this story on the future of IT investment planning. It’s a great look at the shifts in IT roles that are happening as technology shifts take place in the data center and outside of it. The main takeaways here are that cloud services spending is practically guaranteed for IT going forward, and that...

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Way back in 2007, our team here at AppNeta wrote about the panic in IT about the coming IPv6 transition. It’s entertaining now to read about this particular panic, and about the more general technology-specific panic that has occasionally gripped anyone in IT thinking about worst-case scenarios. Back then, the big worry was that the pool of IPv4 addresses had...

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Back in the old days of networking, the parts of the whole were pretty easy to see. Network devices like routers and switches were in-house hardware, and the users accessing the network were probably in the same building as the network. In the same way, network performance was easy to see. The scope of troubleshooting didn’t extend much past the...

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We’ve come across a lot of talk about “cloud-native” apps lately. (They even have their own foundation!) Developers build these apps specifically to run on a cloud-based infrastructure, with the kind of user interface we all expect from our apps now. Cloud-native applications are scalable, usable and flexible, usually packaged using containers. It’s a step further in the cloud computing journey,...

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Acronyms rule the IT world, and the networking field is no exception to this. We've collected a few of the acronyms that we come across often in our performance monitoring world. Do you know what they all mean? If you tweet us or leave a comment with your score, our CMO promises to do a pushup for every correct answer.  ...

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IT’s job today is to keep user productivity high by providing a good app experience and well-running networks. There are plenty of challenges that can get in the way: shadow IT bringing in mystery SaaS apps, capacity planning and DDoS and other attacks. Not long ago, an event like Cyber Monday might have thrown yet another wrench in the infrastructure...

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It happened gradually, but at some point WiFi networks moved from a nice-to-have bonus feature in the office to become a standard part of a business’s IT infrastructure. Now that mobile devices are such a critical part of work, WiFi is essential. It needs care and attention as other networks do. Strong WiFi performance is also necessary in a business’s...

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Welcome to Friday, and may yours be pleasant and relaxed, even in light of this piece of news: IT may need to add User Awareness and Adoption as something to consider along with the rest of its big to-do list, according to a recent Nemertes Research webinar based on its research. The “UAA” acronym refers to the idea of making...

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The latest in mobile operating systems from Apple—iOS 10—hit virtual update shelves today. What it means for consumers is clear: new features as well as updated core apps like Maps and Messaging. What it means for wireless networks in your office is a different story. The Lowdown on the Update Weighing in at over 1GB, the update will send ripples...

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The job of a network engineer or network administrator is to solve problems, everything from backups and cables to firewalls and viruses. All of these tasks are related to moving data across the network in an optimal and efficient manner so that users can do the work that drives the business. Every network engineer’s job is different, but one thing...

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Welcome to Friday, everyone. It’s back-to-school time, and we’re doing our homework on the latest in application and networking news. This week, we came across this really strong argument in favor of putting user experience at the top of enterprise and website priority lists. This Harvard Business Review piece explores the technical inefficiencies behind poor user experience—and how many companies...

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A company’s network is its transportation system, essential to daily work getting done.  It’s gotten more complex through the years, but the underlying technology used to move packets of data from place to place hasn’t evolved much. In that time, though, applications have moved from on-premises data centers to hosting via the web, or delivered as a service—and the network...

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When we say that networks are congested, we usually mean that a combination of too much data and not enough available capacity to support the applications are involved. We’ll conjure up metaphors of traffic jams, inner-city lane closures and other practical analogies to simplify the concept to users. The ubiquity of the internet these days deems these no longer necessary....

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4 Steps to Networking (and Productivity) Gold The Olympics in Rio are in full swing which means the world’s best athletes competing in nail-biting competitions... what’s not to love? For most corporate IT Ops teams it introduces new challenges at work... like your colleagues following their favorite athletes by streaming their favorite events to their corporate laptops over corporate WiFi....

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I just had to write an Olympic-themed headline, since today is the first day of the 2016 Summer Games! I love the Olympics. It’s so much fun watching athletes do what they’re best at. Plus, they have the extra challenge this year of swimming or boating in polluted, mucky water—so it’s even more impressive for the winners, I suppose. Technology...

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The idea of eliminating silos in IT has been a hot topic in the past few years, as virtualization has removed the traditional separations between technologies and teams in the data center. This intersection of people and technology comes with some struggle, as IT teams adapt their jobs, processes and tools to the demanding modern IT world. Silos aren’t easy...

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Salesforce is a heavyweight in the SaaS market, and Salesforce problems can affect thousands of users. Salesforce has an online status dashboard that many users leverage to monitor the application and determine whether it’s working properly and performing to expectations. However,trust.salesforce.com is really just an internal dashboard Salesforce set up so you can check on whether everything within the Salesforce...

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Video conferencing is increasingly a part of daily office life. Ad-hoc meeting software like Google Hangouts, HipChat, Slack and Skype have popularized virtual face-to-face meetings. But formal meetings with entry codes like GoToMeeting and WebEx are often relied on for marketing webinars or sales demos. Regardless of purpose, video conferencing has evolved over the years from multi-screen hardware deployments to...

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If you are having network issues, the downstream effects are going to show up in the end-user experience of your business-critical applications. According to an Aberdeen Group survey of 158 organizations,, app performance issues have a direct impact on the business, including declined employee productivity (64%), lost revenue opportunities (41%), decreased customer satisfaction (61%) and damage to brand reputation (39%)....

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Department managers need to be aware of the productivity issues their teams are having, particularly with respect to the applications they need to use throughout their workday to get their jobs done. Today’s organizations are using SaaS applications more predominantly — sales, service and support departments are usually relying on Salesforce to provide them with critical customer data, while the...

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With the increasing use of SaaS applications, companies require new performance monitoring strategies. They need solutions that can provide the visibility and insights needed for continuous monitoring focused on the end user experience and immediate, precise troubleshooting of SaaS application performance. At Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft’s largest and most comprehensive technology event, we’ll be exhibiting our SaaS Application Monitoring (SAM) solution,...

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In my last blog, I talked about what to consider as you migrate to Office 365. As we all know, Microsoft Office has always dominated the business and consumer application marketplace with little to no competition. However, in recent years, the use of Google Apps has been growing to the point where it’s capturing a large chunk of the market....

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Application Performance Management (APM) has traditionally focused on monitoring the infrastructure and the internal components of applications a company builds and operates. In the past few years, APM has evolved its focus to take into consideration the end users and how applications are performing for them. However, we’re seeing that there are other types of applications that a business relies...

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The City of San Francisco recently launched free #SFWiFi service in 32 of the city’s public spaces thanks to a grant from Google. Coincidentally, the day it launched, I made a move from Boston to San Francisco and found a handful of these spaces to be close to my new neighborhood. I set out with my trusty iPhone 5 and...

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FlowView provides detailed insight into the applications on one’s network, but to achieve this, we need to store a lot of data. Behind the scenes, when we are trying to get top applications or top hosts and categories, FlowView has two available data sources: Google BigQuery and raw capture files. BigQuery is fast for many use cases, especially when the...

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As companies turn to SaaSas a low cost, highly scalable, and agile way to host new applications, a number of cloud performance management and monitoring solutions are appearing. Salesforce led the CRMs in moving off of dedicated hardware, and other types of applications like email, project planning, and even EHR have followed suit. Moving away from installed software side-steps a...

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When verifying that FlowView is identifying flows with the correct application, we use tcpreplay to send traffic from packet capture files into an appliance capture interface. The packet captures can be homemade by us or from our customers. These packet captures are typically recorded without filtering, so naturally they will contain extraneous protocols and many mid-conversation sessions that happened to...

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Depending on your travel agenda, a cross-country flight can be an opportunity to work offline without the usual real-time distractions or catch up on the latest episode of Silicon Valley. With in-flight wireless like Gogo becoming widely available, you may be tempted to keep in touch with colleagues from 35,000 feet, or post to facebook because you can. While connectivity...

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As application deployments get more complex, the tools to make sure they're working have certainly more than kept up. Not only do we have tools to monitor hardware health, but there are tools to measure network performance, application performance, and resource usage for every conceivable piece of every system. Unfortunately, collecting data for data’s sake doesn’t keep any application running,...

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Jitter is a term used to describe variation in the arrival times of packets over a network. In packet switched networks, it is sometimes referred to as packet delay variation. Generally caused by congestion in the IP network, jitter can be a serious issue for interactive real-time traffic, e.g. VoIP. This article discusses how jitter is measured in PathView, and...

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A video conferencing partner of ours asked for help with a high-profile technology customer recently. The vendor’s gear was being blamed for frequent video conferencing session drops. This was causing friction between vendor and the customer’s network team, and pressure on the IT manager was mounting to fix the issue at all costs. The symptom: Otherwise healthy video conference sessions...

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Knowing which websites and applications are in use on your network is hard. The number of Saas services, Cloud-based services and smart device apps that are in use is growing at an astronomical rate. But if these apps are impacting the performance of the applications which run your business, you need to get a handle on them and understand their...

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Want to build a packet generator using free software and commodity hardware? Wouldn’t it be nice if that packet generator was just as fast as expensive hardware-based packet generators? What if it was more powerful, flexible and easier to use than commercial alternatives? My blog “Why Test NetFlow with Tcpreplay 4.0” introduced Tcpreplay 4.0 as an alternative to hardware packet generators....

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What is a Path? A Path is the network connection from a source to a target, specifically measuring the maximum end to end performance achievable. For example a Path from our office here in Boston to the Salesforce.com instance we use (NA2) located outside of Chicago consists of 12 layer 3 network hops. We have a 100Mbps symmetric internet connection...

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Ever wonder if your “ISP is giving you the bandwidth” you are paying for? Do you think your download speeds are different at different times of day? If so, you might want to detect and measure the rate limiting on your network. What is Rate Limiting? Network rate limiting is used to limit the amount of traffic on a network....

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In my blog “NetFlow Performance Testing with Tcpreplay 4.0” I introduced new IP Flow / NetFlow features that I recently added to Tcpreplay, with the claim that this is the best solution for testing Layer 7 flow collectors. Today we discover how Layer 7 collectors differ from traditional flow collectors, and why they need to be tested differently. So, what is are...

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When we set out to make a super fast and super accurate application-aware flow collector, we found ourselves with a dilemma. How do we test it? How do you generate complex combinations of business and recreational application traffic and at 10GigE speeds? How do we generate Candy Crush, YouTube and SalesForce plus hundreds of other Layer 7 applications simultaneously at...

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So you've heard about PathView and FlowView, read some reviews, checked out our website, and you think they sound like they're just the bee's knees (and they are). You've talked to our excellent salesfolk, purchased an appliance and licenses, received your AppNeta login credentials, and now a box has shown up on your doorstep. Your new appliance If you've nabbed yourself...

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Today, we're excited to annouce another major milestone in open-sourcing our technology: Fred Klassen has officially accepted maintainership of Tcpreplay. After a major overhaul of the internals, we're excited to release version 4.0.0, to which Fred has contributed extensively. Tcpreplay is a suite of Free (GPLv3) utilities for editing and replaying previously captured network traffic. Originally designed to replay malicious...

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This article will be part of a series of articles describing how various network issues are presented by AppNeta Performance Manager. We begin with packet loss. Packet loss occurs when one or more packets failed to reach its intended destination. This article shows how high packet loss is presented on AppNeta. Packet loss also manifests itself by degrading other network metrics...

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If you’re into network traffic analysis, FlowView gives you incredible insight into what is running on your network with simple deployment.  This month, we’re celebrating you, the people who take the time to look at your network traffic with FlowVemeber, where we’re giving 10% of all FlowView proceeds in November to the national Movember charities. When we launched FlowView last year,...

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This is the first post of Flowvember - AppNeta’s celebration of really awesome, application-aware traffic analysis technology. And in the spirit of Movember and FlowVember, we challenge you to join us in growing out your mustache and checking out your network traffic. Get AppNeta’s FlowView free trial here. And, if you like what you see and decide to buy, we...

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“Why monitor a path and not just the device?” It’s a great question that I routinely get asked when talking about our technology on demonstrations, and it just so happens that I had a good chance to conduct a little experiment outside of a normal work environment during my recent trip to our nation’s capital to attend Surge. What does...

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f you listen to the radio around Valentine’s Day, you hear endless commercials from companies soliciting their once-a-year products. I decided to perform my own test to unearth which ad was the most effective at attracting web traffic leading up to February 14th.  I monitored five different websites – 1800-Flowers, Edible Arrangements, Hallmark and Pajamagram – using PathView to see what their...

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This past summer, I wrote about T1s and three best practices for WAN Performance. As I mentioned in that post, T1-class WAN services are a popular way to connect branch offices to corporate data centers and the Internet for voice and other application services. While the 1.54Mbps definition of a T1 hasn’t changed over time, it’s now common to see multiple T1...

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Bandwidth is a coveted resource in most offices. Since businesses rely so heavily on the internet, it’s imperative that your organization has adequate bandwidth to support the day-to-day workload. Without it, businesses can come to a screeching halt. Every organization needs a different amount of bandwidth depending on its size and the type of applications that are running on its...

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It’s a pretty normal scene in offices across the globe – an employee has some down time on their hands, so they head on over to social media sites such as Facebook. Instead of seeing a newsfeed full of status updates from their closest friends and family members, the employee is greeted with a bold “access denied” message. While the...

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Server virtualization is one of the most important IT trends of the past decade. According to Gartner, server virtualization has recently surpassed 50% of all server workloads, and the number of virtualization workloads is likely to grow fivefold by 2015. Drivers for this rapid adoption include reduced hardware costs, improved resource utilization, radically streamlined provisioning and more – all leading to improvements in data...

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For more than 20 years, SNMP monitoring was the default approach to network performance management. It was your only option, but this just isn’t the case anymore. Application components are no longer delivered just from your datacenter, but are delivered from private clouds and from third-party services hosted outside of your control zone in the public cloud with multiple potential...

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Every year around this time, people start to give thanks.  Either for the things they have, for the people in their lives or for the great gifts.  During the following weeks, there will be mistletoe hanging, carolers caroling and a whole bunch of people shopping online for the best deals.  With all this shopping, there are network performance concerns all...

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Attention all iPad users – there is a new (FREE) app in town! PathTest gives your easy and accurate measurement of your network performance over Wi-Fi or your cellular provider. Get the app now – click here to download PathTest. With PathTest you can: Determine your network’s actual upload and download performance Measure the performance from your network to multiple internet targets or enter...

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Now more than ever, IT teams need to know exactly what is happening on the network, and which users and devices may be contributing to performance degradation. This level of insight is essential to gauging the impact that various activity has on the network – and ultimately to ensuring the performance of IP-based applications like cloud services, SaaS tools, VoIP,...

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Are your employees deploying personal devices on your company’s network? If the answer is no, you should think again. 84% of smartphone users are also using their devices at work. While Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) could mean increased productivity for your employees, it also is a potential threat to your overall network performance and the delivery of the applications...

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How Do I? This is the first of a series of posts detailing how to solve common network and application performance issues and to get the most out of PathView Cloud. To solve any problem you need to have the network instrumented properly, so today we will cover: How do I set up PathView  Cloud on my network? 1. Understand your...

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I know we’ve talked about it a lot here on the Performance Monitoring Blog, but I cannot stress enough the importance of end user experience monitoring. Unfortunately, your customers do not care if a problem is inside your datacenter or outside your control – they will hold you ultimately responsible for their web experiences on your pages.Customers lack patience for poor...

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By: Jim Melvin Everyone love’s the Olympics and it is easy to see why — the Olympics truly have something for everyone.  From cycling, to soccer, to archery, and basketball; the breadth of sports (36 in all) covers just about every sport that you could want (except for lacrosse, one of my personal favorites). What we are seeing, though, is...

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Our Systems Engineering team regularly helps customers deploy PathView Cloud to measure end user experience at remote offices. One of PathView’s unique features is the ability to measure actual achievable network capacity.  T1 class WAN services are a popular way to connect branch offices to corporate data centers and the Internet. I say ‘T1’ class because businesses are deploying WAN services that...

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According to this report by the Pew Research Center (February 2012), 46% of American adults now own a smartphone of some kind, up from 35% in May 2011. Smartphone owners now outnumber users of more basic phones. These smartphone users are bringing their personal devices to work and connecting them to your network. For many businesses, an open BYOD policy...

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WAN optimization techniques help data flow more efficiently across the WAN with a variety of approaches: optimizing bandwidth utilization, reducing data volumes through deduplication, accelerating applications, reducing latency and more. The goal of WAN optimization is not just to increase effective bandwidth, but also to help ensure sufficient and predictable operation of QoS under the variety of conditions. WAN optimization...

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Gone are the days when organizations would give their employees a PC and expect it to be the only device used on the network. It’s a “bring your own device” (BYOD) world out there now, and the trend to allow users to bring their own smart phones, tablets and other mobile gear to work is only going to accelerate. That...

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The advantages of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) versus on-premise deployments are well known. Among the most notable from an IT perspective are: Remote, hassle free upgrades and maintenance, shorter deployment time and no configurations (minutes vs. months for a phased implementation) Cost savings in infrastructure and human resource requirements Reduced business risk due to lower upfront costs and faster implementation But even...

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Network performance management solutions are supposed to make IT’s job easier, but implementing the solution can be a nightmare. IT departments just don’t have the budget or the staff to deal with traditional network performance management solutions that require software to be purchased and installed, or that demand manual software installation, configuration and upgrades. Deployment also encompasses not just what it...

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Healthcare practices today run on networked applications that connect remote users (hospitals, physicians, clinics) to centralized or hosted resources. Electronic Health Records (EHR), web-based clinical health programs, inter-site communication and online medical registries are all critically dependent on network and application performance. Any drop in bandwidth or increase in latency can make these applications unusable or inaccessible, potentially compromising patient...

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Remember when data, video and voice networks were separate? Before cloud was a buzz word, cellphones were only for calls, virtualization was in its infancy and what’s an iPad? Considering all of these changes, it seems an impossible job for network teams to maintain high functioning networks and applications with the flood of changes we have experienced throughout the IT...

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Before business productivity became dependent on the Internet, smaller companies didn’t spend money on flow analysis data. Even enterprise companies didn’t invest in expensive network hardware capable of delivering flow information at the scattered remote offices. It was never a concern until the Internet became a business and personal life line – and pipeline – regardless of location size. Personal...

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Security is a well-known risk with cloud applications, but…what about bandwidth? More and more businesses are looking to cut costs and improve end customer experience by moving customer-facing applications, storage/backup solutions, and many other applications to distributed data centers in the cloud. If users experience performance or latency problems due to insufficient network bandwidth, such as slow, stalling or failed...

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The countdown to 2012 continues with Network Performance Management Prediction #2 – Mixing Business and IT!  Productivity is dependent on a functioning network. If the phones are down, then so is business. Therefore, network performance solutions must provide actionable and easily understood information that can be interpreted by more than network engineers. Of course, there will be data that requires...

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We’re counting down to 2012 with Network Performance Predictions! Inspired by an article by Matt Stevens, AppNeta CTO, we have pulled together three insights that will impact network performance management next year. So, prediction #3 is… Bad Bandwidth. Cheap bandwidth is great and getting cheaper all the time. However, an increase in the bandwidth does not necessarily correspond with an...

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Improve Reliability A reliable network means peace of mind and happy end users. The ability to remotely monitor and troubleshoot all business critical applications from one interface will allow you to pinpoint issues before the end users pick up the phone to complain, or submit support tickets. Remotely diagnose and remediate issues without disrupting business operations and reduce incoming issues...

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Credit cards and debit cards– the life lines to our bank accounts. These slates of plastic are also the life lines for retail stores. These days, except when someone walks into a storefront and makes a purchase with cash, chances are that nearly every sale a retailer makes involves the Internet or an online transaction. Online shopping and other forms...

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When it comes to online trading, network latency is everything – because delays are more costly in this industry than almost any other. The stock market doesn’t stand still while data is in transit, and the difference between a “fresh” price quote and one that’s a few milliseconds out of date can cost or earn brokers and their clients hundreds...

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A Managed Service Provider’s survival is dependent on predictable and high-performing network and applications. End users will not pay for a faulty service. Period. Ensuring that a customer’s network maintains optimal performance is a full time job, especially with the implementation of new IP based services such as VoIP, Video, VDI or cloud services. Having a technician on-site 24/7 could...

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Raise your hand if an end user has complained of a slow file transfer? You can’t tell, but my hand is the highest. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) transfers have been around since the dawn of the civilization.  Not really, but it has been around for the duration of the internet. Point being, the FTP is everywhere. This made me think,...

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It is a long accepted practice to build three-tier data center LANs based on access, distribution and core switches. But now data center LANs are being re-architected to meet the demands of virtualization, SaaS and cloud computing. The question now is, what architectures and technologies are appropriate  for this new purpose? For example, what is the best alternative to the...

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It’s a great time to be a connected consumer.  Our favorite audio, video and news products are available from multiple online sources and can be immediately consumed on the nearest connected device.  Sometimes the path to a great viewing experience is painless and it just works.  At other times achieving a quality viewing experience can be a real challenge.  As...

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Today’s distributed data centers, with their layers upon layers of virtual and physical devices and systems, are dauntingly complex and getting more so every day. The accelerating adoption of IP-based services like cloud computing, virtual desktop infrastructure and unified communications is further compounding this complexity, while also massively increasing the scope of the network. All this growth and change confounds...

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How are you ensuring a successful transition before plugging in the first phone? VoIP, Video and Unified Communications are highly cost-effective network services. While your wallet may be breathing a sigh of relief, your network is about to get the wind knocked out of it by the  weight of VoIP and video conferencing services. Network performance is dependent on existing applications and...

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Today’s business services are increasingly dependent on predictable network performance and availability. At the same time, changes to network infrastructure  – such as the addition of IP-based services like VoIP, video conferencing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS); the proliferation of Wi-Fi-connected devices; unmanaged elements such as streaming audio– all mean that performance requirements for your customers’ critical applications demand a much higher...

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From the largest regional medical centers to small provider offices, today’s healthcare organizations depend on network sensitive applications. Electronic Health Records (EHR), ePrescriptions, web-based clinical records, online medical registries, desktop virtualization, VoIP, IP storage, cloud–based system, Software-as-a-Service — all of these critical applications rely on network performance. When bandwidth, latency and other key parameters fall below acceptable thresholds, network dependent services abruptly become...

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These days practically every organization depends on multiple IP-based services, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud-based applications, VoIP, video conferencing, virtual desktops and IP storage. All these critical services depend on network performance. Today’s IP-based services operate within a narrow Quality of Service (QoS) range. When network bandwidth, latency, jitter and/or packet loss parameters drift outside those tight limits, critical business...

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Why are more and more organizations building their own clouds, often in addition to leveraging the cost and scalability advantages of private cloud services? For many heavily regulated businesses, such as financial services and healthcare firms, demands for the highest levels of security for sensitive data have made private cloud alternatives more appealing. Private clouds also optimize the ability to...

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The reach and popularity of video conferencing, telepresence and visual collaboration services is exploding, enabling business to happen 24×7 around the world. But, if you’re a consumer or provider of these increasingly business-critical applications, you know they depend entirely on one thing: network performance. IP-based videoconferencing requires high-performance WAN links. This class of applications operates within a narrow Quality of...

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Many organizations underestimate the operational and business risk associated with deploying performance sensitive applications like VoIP, video conferencing, IP storage or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to remote locations. Other projects such as transitioning to a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network or integrating company networks due to a merger or acquisition can present significant performance problems for business critical services Prior...

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The education industry is embracing cloud computing more rapidly than any other sector excluding large enterprises. According to recent studies by IDC and CDW, today more than one-third of higher education IT departments are either implementing or maintaining cloud-based systems. Among the most compelling benefits that cloud-based services offer educational institutions are: Low-cost, anytime/anywhere accessibility to high-end computing resources The...

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As a managed services provider (MSP), your clients look to you to keep their business services up and running. With the advent of cloud computing, SaaS, virtual desktops, VoIP, IP-based storage and other trends, more and more of those business-critical services depend on the performance of IP-based networks. MSPs face new service delivery challenges, including: Old-school, break-fix approaches to network...

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There’s no question that the healthcare sector is rapidly embracing cloud computing. Recent studies by IDC and CDW both show that one-third of healthcare organizations are already implementing or maintaining cloud-based systems – ranking third among sectors polled, just behind large enterprises and higher education. Healthcare IT organizations estimate spending  21% of their budgets on cloud computing over the next...

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Today’s video conferencing and telepresence solutions offer amazing reliability, incredible business value and a huge range of features and price points. No wonder there’s so much video running on enterprise networks! But like other IP-based applications from VoIP, to SaaS, to virtual desktops, video conferencing applications are highly sensitive to network performance. The health of your network is vitally important...

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Open source award winner Wireshark is probably the most widely deployed network protocol analyzer/packet sniffer out there. It lets you capture and interactively browse network traffic, and shows the packets to you in a human-readable form. Wireshark is the tool that first made the world of network and application troubleshooting accessible to IT staff. Thanks to the contributions of networking...

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Burgeoning growth in the use of mobile devices is surely among the most significant trends impacting enterprise communications. Much of this growth is uncontrolled, as droves of employees increasingly make use of their personal mobile devices over company networks, as they’re accustomed to doing at home. How can you get a handle on what your mobile users are up to,...

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With the meteoric rise in enterprise deployments of IP-based services, network performance management has joined security at the top of every CTO’s list of concerns. It has become imperative to monitor end-to-end network performance from the point of delivery to the point of consumption from the user’s perspective, in order to know whether service levels are being met. For many...

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The cost reduction and infrastructure consolidation benefits of unified communications and collaboration are so compelling that many organizations are rolling out these services without a solution to manage the user experience. Unified communications monitoring may not be the top priority for businesses. Unified communications aims to converge telephony, messaging, mobile communications, video conferencing and presence-enabled applications onto a common, IP-based network. But...

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The stampede to cloud computing is rapidly altering the design and delivery of IT services. From lower startup costs to lower total cost of ownership to scalability on demand, cloud-based deployments are increasingly considered the most cost- and time-effective approach to rolling out new IT services. But the move to the cloud is not without its challenges, particularly from the...

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We wanted to share the following blog post from Life as a Healthcare CIO by John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston. Today’s post names PathView Cloud as the Cool Technology of the Week. Cool Technology of the Week How many times have you heard the complaint “the application is slow” but lack data about server, network,...

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“Would it help if I connected to the school’s wireless?” asked our guest speaker. “No, that’s even slower than the open wireless” was the response from students in my class, which is why we spent a third of the Creative Director’s presentation time waiting for his commercials to load. My Advertising, Media and Society class was fortunate enough to have...

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Santa Claus.  The Easter Bunny.  Good tasting, fat-free snack foods.  Myths?  Maybe so. But one absolute myth that is 100% untrue, and that 99% of the vendors of network performance solutions have been perpetrating for years (and whose users have been gobbling up like zero calorie french fries…) is the myth of bandwidth; more specifically, the myths of utilized and...

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Listening to the radio at work used to be just about keeping the volume down. But with the skyrocketing popularity of Pandora, Vevo.com, Shoutcast, SoundCloud and other Internet radio services, the issue has become one of exhausting scarce bandwidth on overtaxed corporate networks. Employees are accustomed to enjoying Internet radio services at home, and many no doubt access them at...

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Our legacy blog entries tell the AppNeta story from the early days…Read on! Telecommuting in all its forms has been on the rise for years. Today the trend is accelerating dramatically as affordable, cloud-based technology, rising gas prices, and pressure to reduce facilities’ operating costs all converge to make telework more attractive for all—and the enterprise more distributed than ever....

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We like to celebrate our history! Our legacy blog entries tell the AppNeta story from its inception as Apparent Networks. Thanks to multiple snowballing trends like cloud computing, SaaS, virtual desktops, IP storage, mobility and Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C), more and more companies are delivering critical, network-dependent IT services to more and more remote users. The adoption of Cloud...

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High-definition video conferencing from your computer or mobile device out to anyone, anywhere has arrived. While all tiers of the video conferencing and telepresence marketplace are experiencing strong growth, the biggest leaps are happening with low-cost, desktop- and browser-based “single-codec” systems. Among the many options in this burgeoning space: Tandberg, now owned by Cisco, offers a range of office, desktop and mobile...

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The move to Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) is accelerating rapidly as technologies mature and early adopters reap competitive advantages like reduced costs, simplified IT infrastructure, better customer service and improved business performance. The growing availability of UC&C-as-a-service means that companies of all sizes are embracing the trend. UC&C encompasses the convergence of telephony, messaging, video conferencing, presence-enabled applications and...

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Sound familiar? I know this is a question many of you ask yourself regularly, if not daily. There aren’t too many people that would debate the value provided by understanding flow data: the ability to get deep and near real-time insight into the applications and users that are consuming resources on your network.  Flow analysis has been built into a...

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I speak with IT Outsourcers and Managed Service Providers every day, and I am always amazed at how busy they are, but I’m realizing that I shouldn’t be. According to AMR Research, 80% of companies are increasing or maintaining their current level of IT outsourcing in the current year. IT Outsourcing doesn’t just mean organizations shipping their coding jobs to...

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Web-based service delivery models like cloud computing, SaaS and VoIP are revolutionizing IT. These distributed deployments offer cost, scalability and manageability advantages too compelling to pass up. But the performance of web-based applications is heavily dependent on the networks that deliver them to remote sites. A host of variable, intermittent factors can crash business-critical services. Network issues like jitter, packet...

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I spend a good amount of time talking to people about computer networks, their company’s networks, their customers’ networks, telco providers, etc, and the most common question that comes up is “What is using up all my network capacity.” For such a fundamental question this is surprising difficult to answer for the vast majority of companies. Any network engineer worth...

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I count myself lucky that I had a professor in college who took the time to brainwash us all in the ways of network troubleshooting. To this day, I still jolt awake in a cold sweat hearing his voice chant “physical layer! physical layer!”  As many of you know, the Physical layer is  the first layer of the OSI model,...

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We are often asked how our technologies very from traditional network management tools. While most other tools rely on simple network management protocol (SNMP), we utilize our own technology to perform ‘active’ network monitoring infrastructure. Around here, we compare SNMP to a car’s dashboard.  You are able to see how much gas is in the tank, what the engine RPMs...

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It is a sign of the times that I need to clearly define the term “cloud services” if I am going to use it as an entry point to this blog. And since I wouldn’t dare assert my position to be expert enough to properly define this term (any attempt would surely bog down this entire effort), I will turn...

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Our legacy blog entries tell the AppNeta story from the early days…Read on! Much like the ancient mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem,  we often find ourselves awash in a sea of packets that tempt that tantalize us with their ability to quench our troubleshooting thirsts – but just like seawater to a thirsty sailor, they’re often too much...

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When talking to prospective PathView customers, a common question we receive is why we utilize a hardware microAppliance when most remote performance management firms offer a pure software offering.  The move from a software sequencer to a hardware microAppliance for the PathView Remote Performance Management Service is to promote the highest quality service to our customers. An inherent problem with...

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When companies were using virtualization technology to consolidate IT infrastructure that wasn’t truly real-time in nature, the network performance of these virtual machines was not a major concern. Generally, all they had to do was put a Gig E card into the host and everything would work itself out fine. All of the VM monitoring and management tools focused on...

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Retire network diagrams, you say?  How will you know where the servers are? What about the network connecting everything together? Isn’t this stuff important? Yes, absolutely! All of the above is important, but the details are becoming increasingly less important to you. Network diagrams are a great for documenting the details of all the pieces that come together to delivery...

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Our legacy blog entries tell the AppNeta story from the early days…Read on! While building AppCritical Version 3.6, our development team had many spirited discussions about the underpinnings of networked services and applications. Services delivered over a network have been around since…well, since before the Internet. This isn’t a history lesson so we can skip the details. What’s important is...

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] Our legacy blog entries tell the AppNeta story from the early days…Read on! If you have been around IT or technology in general for more than a couple of years, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “The network is the computer.”  Often this is mistakenly attributed to Sun Microsystems’ founding CEO, Scott McNealy – when actually it was another Sun visionary,...

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We like to celebrate our history! Our legacy blog entries tell the AppNeta story from it's inception as Apparent Networks. Our customer announcement with BCS Global today really highlights two key points. First, whether you’re a provider or a consumer of cloud-based applications or services, it’s very likely that you are experiencing management challenges with those services. Second, for innovative...

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