Archive of posts with category 'performance monitoring'

Earlier this summer, we unpacked the findings of Accenture’s “Perspective on Cloud Outcomes: Expectation vs. Reality” report, which found that of 200 IT pros polled, hardly one third are satisfied with the results of their cloud migration to date. Now, another report from Accenture is driving the point home that as a new generation of business solutions – namely, cloud...

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Another week, another round of mixed-messages for the retail sector, as a string of recent news continues to paint a fuzzy picture for the future of the industry as it reckons with digital transformation. First up was a report from Best Buy that delivered about as mixed a message as market watchers could imagine. While the brand’s latest earnings report,...

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From funky new approaches to interior design to “thinking green” about plastic toiletries, many established hotel brands are going to great lengths to appeal to a new generation of travelers who put “experiences” (read: Instagrammable moments) ahead of material when it comes to spending. But the biggest and most impactful changes that hotel brands are instituting lately go beyond edgy...

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We recently discussed how educators in Florida are spearheading a revolutionary telehealth initiative to connect students living with the trauma of last year’s Hurricane Michael – the first Category 5 storm to make landfall in almost three decades – with mental health professionals in schools. But as the southeastern US reckons with the fallout of another monster storm in the...

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According to recent data from analyst firm Atos, banks can increase their operating profits by 30 percent through 2020 by embracing more digital workflows. In particular, hybrid cloud is proving to be the preferred avenue for digital transformation in the finance world, as hybrid helps level the playing field between traditional banks and a slew of digital disruptors. When discussing...

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A decade back, before cell phones became “smart” and armed almost every man, woman and child with a full-fledged, pocket-sized PC, network management teams were able to set and enforce fairly predictable use policies for employee devices. After all, it was (and remains) common for IT to supply computers to employees, while intelligent mobile devices (usually Blackberries, which were hardly...

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According to a survey of Netflix subscribers conducted back in the summer of 2017, almost 40 percent of respondents admitted to streaming from the platform while on the job. Two years later, streaming in general has never been more popular, and a rash of Netflix competitors are about to launch, flooding workers with distracting content they can binge on the...

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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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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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Jealous that you’re missing out on the watercooler chatter surrounding Season 3 of Stranger Things? A new Chrome extension aims to have you covered. Netflix Hangouts is the latest in a long line of programs designed to help workers leverage their office networks for less-than-business-critical activities. The program creates what looks like a standard four-person video conference -- a communication...

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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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This week there are two pieces of news in the DNS world which remind us that DNS is not simply “it just works” technology that can be forgotten about. Like many things, DNS requires a little ongoing care and attention! First is the US-CERT DNS Infrastructure Hijacking Campaign bulletin. It warns of an organized campaign to use compromised credentials to...

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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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AppNeta Performance Manager now supports DNS monitoring for Experience web paths!  Recent blog posts have covered some DNS background and the importance of monitoring DNS performance in a global enterprise environment, particularly the importance of monitoring from the perspective of your end users -- internal and external.  This post introduces AppNeta’s new DNS Monitoring capabilities and gets you started. To...

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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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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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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. Problem A civil engineering firm uses Skype for Business heavily in their day-to-day operations, for both internal and external calls. Since migrating to the cloud last year, it has been their primary VoIP application....

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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. Introduction Transient issues can be a huge problem on large network infrastructures. Not only are they hard to catch, but it is even harder to isolate root cause. A large US telecommunications customer continuously...

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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. What Problem Was the Customer Attempting to Solve? In retail, slow performance in Point of Sale (POS) applications has an immediate impact. When numerous complaints came in regarding overall performance slowdowns for a large...

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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. Context A major US retail chain had been running the AppNeta Performance Manager for 10 months to monitor the retail store WAN services between their primary data center and stores in order to validate...

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AppNeta Performance Manager (APM) 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. Justin previously discussed how to leverage the API to integrate with ServiceNow. Today, we’ll take a look at...

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Security is at the heart of many large organizations and the IT departments we engage with on a daily basis push us to meet their needs. As they’ve become more sophisticated in requirements for authentication we’ve kept in step. For a while now we’ve offered SAML and SSO for our web user interface. With the release of LDAP support, AppNeta customers...

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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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Back in 2011, the average company spent just $6,300 on cloud computing. That’s a drop in the bucket for all but the smallest IT budgets. Things have changed in the intervening years. At the beginning of the decade, companies were just beginning to dip their toes into the cloud. Now they’re completely submerged. Out of companies with more than 1,000...

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Like just about any other technology, WebRTC has followed the hype cycle pretty closely. (Were you surprised to see a headline on this topic in 2018?) WebRTC, an open source project, aims to boost mobile apps and browsers to real-time speed using APIs. After reaching peak hype around 2013, we slipped down into the trough of disillusionment. However, at times...

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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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For at least the last couple of years, IT has been pressured to put everything into the cloud. Whether it’s new startup operating entirely in the cloud or a large, established enterprise trying to migrate, cloud computing has been positioned as the obvious evolution of IT. Everywhere you turned, someone was calling for the death of on-premises infrastructure. While hybrid...

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Managing security and performance in the cloud is a tradeoff. On the one hand, your traditional applications will certainly break—they’ll be unable to monitor the data flaws that occur in the cloud, as there’s no analogue in a traditional data center. On the other hand, you’ll have undreamed-of visibility—something that no traditional data center can match. This visibility is a...

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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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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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Too many software alerts can cause IT teams a lot of annoyance. Though they’re designed to be useful and prevent bigger problems, alerts from multiple systems can easily overload IT inboxes. We hear from customers that they want to use alerting more proactively, rather than continually just reacting to alerts that aren’t all urgent or even necessary. Alert chatter happens...

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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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We’re excited to announce some recent updates to AppNeta Performance Manager, specifically the Delivery and Experience parts of our product. As always, get in touch with questions on any of these topics. You can also check out release notes and see upcoming maintenance windows online. Application Delivery Status at a Glance In our Delivery tool, we’ve redesigned the GeoMap dashboard...

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When you talk about public cloud in IT today, you’re likely talking about Amazon Web Services (AWS). As noted by CloudPro, it’s not even a contest right now: Second-place Azure has gotten to 7.1% of the market, but AWS dominates with more than 44% market share. What’s the secret? Part of Amazon’s impact comes from being first-to-market. Follow that up...

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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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Software as a service (SaaS) tools and applications are now ubiquitous. Research firm Forrester puts it simply: “If you aren’t using SaaS broadly, you’re falling behind.” Why? Because data shows that SaaS “is increasingly the foundation for business opportunities.” Sounds like the perfect solution. But SaaS comes with a unique challenge: The rapid rise of on-demand software services has created...

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ServiceNow has taken the lead in the help desk software market, offering its many customers a way to streamline their service tickets and make IT support teams more efficient. We hear often from our customers that ServiceNow has become a go-to, mission-critical application for them. Part of our continuing work and development is around tight integration of AppNeta data with...

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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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IT Role: Raj Avinish, Senior Network Engineer Company: ATS Automation Needs: Network and application monitoring to improve performance for users at 35+ remote locations Results: Better user experience, improved root cause identification ATS Automation is a tool manufacturing industry leader, with a data center each in the U.S. and Germany. Network engineer Raj Avinish is responsible for the performance of...

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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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Some people are always called upon to fix things. It’s true in families (Hi Mom. Yes, I can fix your computer), and it’s also true in businesses. There are plenty of instances in which people who aren’t necessarily trained for the job might find themselves in charge of a company’s EC2 implementation, for example. If you happen to be one...

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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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Imagine being under the microscope, while also shouldering the responsibility of company-wide productivity. That’s IT in a nutshell, with the help desk as the front line for any dissatisfaction or service interruptions that end users experience. In the past, with on-premises solutions, being the enterprise hero who could solve a problem quickly was difficult. Now, as organizations shift to modern,...

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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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 For companies choosing a hosted productivity solution, there are two obvious options—Office 365 and G Suite. At first glance, they seem fairly similar. Both offer email, storage and a range of productivity tools like word processing, spreadsheets and presentation applications. But what you might not notice with one of the options is a little problem that could ruin your collaboration...

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Not enough American companies are ready for the GDPR—the General Data Protection Regulation, adopted last year in the European Union and set to go into effect in May of 2018. According to research from Spiceworks, only 5% of US companies are currently preparing for these data protection regulations. On the face of it, this seems like a reasonable thing not...

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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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Embracing the digital workplace is top priority for any tech-driven organization—and in a world dominated by smartphones, social media and always-on connected devices, “tech-driven” covers almost any company looking to stay competitive. The challenge is creating an end-user experience that leads to digital solutions. According to CMS Wire, “the heart of every successful digital workplace is a great, engaging experience,...

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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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G Suite is still the underdog compared to Microsoft Office 365. What’s keeping enterprises away? With Google dominating the consumer space, introducing it into the workplace seems like a natural fit for employee experience and productivity. The problem is, enterprises are ingrained in the Microsoft stack, and have been building entire workflows around Office products for years now. Even cavemen...

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Every IT person has seen it happen...and some have done it themselves. Gaming at work is more prevalent than ever. Game clients like Steam and the rise in mobile gaming can cause significant congestion on enterprise networks. While many companies have segmented traffic from mobile devices onto a separate network, the amount of game-related traffic can still be astounding. For...

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APIs are the currency of today’s SaaS-based infrastructures. They allow business IT teams to connect applications in useful, creative ways to meet their particular needs. As a SaaS-based company ourselves, and with most of our customers moving their apps to cloud and SaaS models, our API powers a lot of very cool interconnected infrastructures. All of AppNeta’s detailed metrics and...

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Gmail is an unquestionable titan. 20% of all emails sent worldwide are sent using the Gmail platform, and a total of 1.2 billion users. This email dominance is reflected in the enterprise versions of its applications, known collectively as G Suite. Gmail and the other G Suite apps are now gaining ground for business use. Over three million business customers...

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IT ROLE: Steve Aichelmann, senior director of IT infrastructure NEEDS: Improving internal end-user experience, especially for VoIP RESULTS: Proactive issue resolution, view of performance at 31 global locations As a leading data center provider to just under 1,000 customers globally—including 175 of the Fortune 1000—CyrusOne is known for its excellent customer service, enduring customer relationships and high customer satisfaction levels. It manages data...

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 With Cisco moving to acquire BroadSoft, Unified Communications as a Service platforms are about to seriously streamline. Well, unless you’re Skype for Business. Unlike competing platforms, Skype for Business relies on a myriad of technologies, from a range of vendors, which can make the ecosystem complex to integrate, monitor and manage. The task doesn’t have to be daunting, though. IT...

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We're excited to announce the availability of Google Chrome for AppNeta Performance Manager’s Experience monitoring! AppNeta allows you to monitor end-user experience of any app, whether internal, SaaS or hosted in a public cloud. The AppNeta Monitoring Points used for Experience monitoring are being upgraded so that your Selenium synthetic workflows are run using Chrome rather than Firefox. With Chrome,...

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Skype for Business has an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, which is just about as good as you can ask for in this era of SaaS and cloud apps, right? Dealing with about 8 hours of downtime a year doesn’t seem terrible. However, designing your Skype for Business deployment specifically to meet the minimum network requirements to achieve uptime isn’t the...

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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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There are a staggering number of businesses building their core applications around Amazon Web Services’ cloud offerings, such as their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In 2015, Amazon reported an EC2 growth rate of 95%. It has been used for everything from creating an on-demand supercomputing cluster for pharma research to reinforcing the backend for music-recognition app Shazam. EC2 is extremely...

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 It’s conventional wisdom that nothing worthwhile in life comes cheap and easy. With regards to unified communications and collaboration, that’s pretty true. One frequent promise of SaaS applications has been cost savings compared to on-premises tools. But that only happens when IT is vigilant about SaaS pricing, and savvy about which apps cost more and why. This is a common...

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When you use Amazon Web Services (AWS), you offload a lot of the responsibility for managing those services to the cloud provider. However, you still need to monitor those services and for two main reasons: First, you need to make sure the cloud provider is delivering the level of service you're paying for. Second, you need to make sure the...

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It’s usually a great sign for a business if IT needs to scale up a particular technology quickly—maybe sales are growing, or new employees are coming on board, or a new product shows a lot of promise in the market. It could be a combination of all three. Expectations are usually pretty high from the business side that IT can...

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The internal help desk can be a very busy place for a business. IT is under pressure from users to fix any application or network problems quickly, and now also has to depend on the providers of those apps and networks to get problems solved. So how do you measure how your help desk is performing? Figure out the metrics...

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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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In these days of SaaS applications, the help desk has to be efficient, knowledgeable and able to close tickets fast. Nobody likes waiting, and when your users are experiencing a technology problem, they like waiting even less. You can do a lot proactively to make sure that users spend as little time on hold as possible, but that’s only one...

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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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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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APIs build bridges between applications. Now that companies are moving quickly to cloud-based and SaaS applications, these APIs are a lifesaver. Just one application can have any number of APIs connecting into it, creating a web of communication among important business-critical applications. This API economy has become another facet of modern infrastructure that IT teams has to manage. An EMA...

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Long, long ago, when computer systems of the old glass house-encased Big Iron variety failed, the situation was often cryptically described as an “abend”—a word derived from an IBM error message meaning “ABnormal END.” While the abend was usually accompanied by other codes or messages, it was not much to go on. Data center operators had to do a lot...

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We’re excited to announce some new features in AppNeta Performance Manager for our customers. Our engineers are constantly incorporating improvements and feature requests so that our application and network monitoring product is easy to use and gives you tons of details to find and solve any performance problems. Deploying and Accessing AppNeta You’ll notice a few essential updates in the...

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When you're using the cloud, the network is a crucial part of every application. There isn't anything local; all access is over either the public internet or a direct connection to the cloud. While the cloud provider can ensure adequate resources for performance on their backend, they have no control over the rest of the application delivery path, let alone...

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 Cloud application adoption is a force that can’t be stopped. And honestly, do any IT leaders really want to stop it? There are a lot of benefits to using cloud and SaaS applications. When you move your apps from on-premises to the cloud, life in IT is supposed to get a lot easier. You enjoy faster user adoption, minimize performance...

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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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Lots of SaaS applications come with their own dashboard to show the metrics they think you in IT might want to see. But like GPS systems in cars, most people choose to use their own phones for driving directions because the built-in system's controls are too complicated. When you’re monitoring a SaaS application like Office 365, you’ll see the dashboard...

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Service-level agreements (SLAs) are becoming increasingly familiar territory for the average IT leader. Unfortunately, the number of SaaS SLAs is sprawling across IT organizations to the point that it’s nearly impossible to manage them all. Business-critical applications are increasingly moving to the cloud and it’s only a matter of time before bandwidth resources start to succumb to the pressure—if yours...

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Salesforce is an integral part of many companies’ sales organizations. It’s a SaaS application that’s billed per head, but the selling point for businesses  is the time savings that sales reps can achieve with the organization and optimization of account data. Alas, in a world of app integrations, time savings is not guaranteed, and a business-critical application like Salesforce comes with...

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Disbelief is a common theme in our demo process with potential customers. When we use our 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?...

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The promise of cloud and SaaS was supposed to be that it’s hands-off for IT and won’t take up internal resources. But for Office 365 at least, that’s not the case. One study found that 70% of enterprises using Office 365 report latency issues on a weekly basis, and 33% report them daily. This story has more details about 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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We hear from prospects and customers a lot that they didn’t realize they could monitor their entire infrastructure. That infrastructure today is complicated: The mix of cloud providers, SaaS apps and remote offices, along with tech-savvy, distributed users, can be pretty daunting. It’s not surprising that monitoring it all seems hard—it’s a concept that doesn’t seem possible for many in...

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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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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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So you've transitioned your company to SaaS. What a relief. No more license tracking, no more deploying patches and updates and helping users who have problems with an application. The SaaS vendor will handle all your problems, right? Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. The vendor is supporting dozens, hundreds or thousands of clients, and chances are you aren't their biggest...

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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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Is it time yet to acknowledge that unified communications (UC) is more of a buzzword than a real business solution? We’ve been hearing about the promises of UC applications for upwards of 20 years—ever since messaging and real-time communication started coming together. But the real temptation of UC was that all of your communications needs—voice, video, instant messaging—would come together...

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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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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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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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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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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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One morning last week, I came into the office to find that the folks in our Boston office couldn’t consistently access Salesforce.com. But of course I already knew this. I had gotten an alert from AppNeta Performance Manager that the app wasn’t functioning correctly, so I could quickly troubleshoot the issue. As Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at AppNeta, it’s definitely...

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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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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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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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You’ve just gotten to work when a new support ticket comes in from your company's San Francisco remote office (you’re at headquarters in Boston). Office 365 was running very slowly yesterday. It’s their third help desk ticket this week, and the others are still unresolved in ServiceNow. Your first move is to call the user, only to hear that everything...

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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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It’s taken more than a decade, but we’ve finally reached the point where VoIP lines are the primary means of communication for enterprises. Business leaders love it because VoIP, videoconferencing and other elements of unified communications (UC) can significantly improve employee productivity. Using unified communications can also help businesses have more flexibility and options, such as supporting more remote locations...

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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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Are you ever tired of all the so-called disruptive technologies that business leaders keep asking you to implement? It’s great to see so much innovation that can impact your business—but sometimes you just want the IT infrastructure to remain stable for a little while. So, when you hear Microsoft’s Harry Shum, executive vice president of AI and research, say “We...

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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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 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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Remote monitoring is an old problem. In fact, it was a challenge 150 years ago with the emergence of the so-called Victorian Internet, the global communication network based on electric telegraphy. That “internet” depended on human monitoring and the most basic kinds of performance measures. Today, no one charged with monitoring distant IT functions at remote locations has the luxury...

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In today’s increasingly mobile workplace, organizations need to consider productivity, operational efficiency, and business continuity when migrating their employees, data centers and critical applications to the cloud. As new collaboration technologies make productive, remote teamwork possible, businesses can expect their roster of off-site employees to continue to grow. Along with employees working remotely, companies today are often supporting a remote...

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How are you holding up against digital transformation? It’s the question looming large over even the most prominent business leaders. But don’t worry—everyone is in the same boat as legacy IT infrastructures get pushed to their limits. However, if you have a large network of remote workers and offices, you might be facing greater challenges than less-distributed companies. The problem...

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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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With cloud computing, you’ve got a lot to think about when picking providers. Check out this cloud migration checklist that’s along the lines of moving to a new house. It’s a good breakdown of the individual steps of a cloud migration. As an IT person in the modern world, you’ll probably be able to add your own opinions to this...

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A recent survey found that 85% of enterprise decision makers feel they have just two years to execute digital transformation before they start falling behind the competition. And who do you think they’ll turn to for support in this endeavor? The IT department, of course. Because the cloud is such a critical component of digital transformation, you’ll need to develop...

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Synthetic monitoring uses scripting to simulate what actual users are experiencing in a SaaS or web application. IT often doesn’t have to interact with SaaS or web apps, especially if they’re only used by certain users or departments. So synthetic monitoring helps IT to understand baseline performance over time, then see deviations from it when users complain. Synthetic monitoring can...

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Synthetic monitoring is a modern way to see the performance of today’s SaaS and web applications and networks. It uses scripting to emulate the paths that end users take as they experience an application. Why We Need Best Practices for Synthetics Synthetic monitoring provides IT staff with performance context for business-critical SaaS and web apps. Except for company-wide deployments, IT...

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Have you ever had the feeling of Silicon Valley envy? Think of a company like Airbnb experiencing exponential growth by making the most of AWS cloud computing. It would be nice if we could all just leave our legacy-laden on-premises data centers behind and go all-in on the cloud. Traditional businesses are moving more and more workloads to the cloud,...

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In this modern world of IT, you’ve probably got some new colleagues in your life—namely, the cloud and SaaS providers who now hold your infrastructure in their hands. These business relationships—yes, they’re technology-based, but cloud and SaaS are business models—will become as important to your IT team and your company as the hardware and software you used to install. Once...

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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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In this brave new world of running businesses with cloud and SaaS technology, who’s buying hardware anymore? Well, cloud providers, that’s who. Financial filings from AWS, Microsoft and Google show they spent a combined $31.54 billion on capital expenditures and capital leases in 2016. Amazon is building a new cloud region in Sweden, and analysts say one region alone can...

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We’d all like to fulfill that “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” cliché. But in reality, every job (even if it’s our dream job) comes with its downsides. For you, the constant fight against shadow IT might get on your last nerves. For your developer coworkers, infrastructure management is the roadblock that...

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Your business leaders are in search of a cloud expert to help them navigate the increasingly complicated world of cloud applications. But if you read our recent post defining cloud brokers, you might still be wondering why you can’t be the in-house cloud expert your company needs. There’s nothing stopping you from becoming an internal cloud broker for your business—but...

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These days, organizations of all sizes are struggling to balance the constant demands of users with the ever-pressing need to keep technology and business operations running smoothly. Most businesses are undertaking some form of migration to the cloud. Done properly, cloud can offer high availability and help businesses avoid the potentially disastrous costs of downtime and negative publicity that can...

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In an environment powered primarily by SaaS applications and cloud services, the devil is in the details. Cloud and SaaS licensing is one detail that often torments IT teams. Here’s how it works and how to make managing licenses easier. How Do SaaS and Cloud Licenses Work? In the old days of IT, software licensing was part of the software...

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We’ve all had that feeling before: The feeling that you’re missing something that everyone else is in on. For today’s IT leaders, that feeling might come up when you hear talk about cloud brokers. Meanwhile, you head back into your office and deal with your ever-growing shadow IT problem. But the cloud-broker whispers and your shadow IT issues are linked....

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So you’ve decided to take the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) approach to cloud migration. That’s great—you’re on your way to realizing the cost savings and flexibility of cloud computing. But the decisions don’t stop when you choose between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Choosing your public cloud provider—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP)—is the next...

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On the topic of cloud finances, we’ve got some good news and bad news for you. First, the good news: IT teams are poised to become in-house cloud brokers and experts, with a stake in big business decisions. The bad news, however, is that you, as an IT team member, have to learn more about finances than you likely have...

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At this point in the hybrid cloud evolution, data is accumulating quickly in the cloud and in data centers, not to mention moving from place to place. So it's natural that storage concerns are rising. This recent survey from Wikibon found that software services are the most popular use of cloud technology, followed by infrastructure and platform services. All these...

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Spending time and resources monitoring your end-user experience can have a massive impact on your enterprise’s operational efficiency, customer retention and employee productivity—all quantifiable metrics that are proven to increase your company’s profits. Still, the data behind the end-user experience seems hazy for many enterprises. It’s also hard to gauge what the ROI would be, so there’s often diminished motivation...

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SaaS has become the way of the world for enterprise application delivery. The vast majority of enterprises now trust the software-as-a-service model for everything from niche applications to mission-critical tools. However, SaaS applications are a bit of a double-edged sword. The cloud-based model offers the agility necessary to stay ahead of digital demands, with improved reliability and security vs. years...

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When choosing a cloud provider, you can look at brand recognition, security and storage features and other items. But cloud providers depend on networks just like the rest of us, and they’re not all created or configured equal. In general, for those considering the cloud, it’s important to match up the location of your end users and the cloud location...

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It wasn’t too long ago that cloud computing had more detractors than supporters. Companies (especially in the enterprise world) just weren’t ready to relinquish control of applications and business processes. And yet, the light of cloud benefits has slowly drawn the business world in as SaaS apps and cloud infrastructure become entrenched in IT. The benefits of cloud migration are...

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Just when you thought you’d heard every cloud-related term out there, here’s a new(ish) one: multicloud. This one, at least, is pretty straightforward. It refers to businesses using more than one public cloud provider at a time. Now that there’s more than one mature public cloud option (sorry, AWS), you can actually take a best-of-breed approach to cloud computing. Multicloud...

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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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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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The closer the relationship between an application and your revenue, the easier it is to measure the impact of poor performance. This is why, for example, researchers found that an e-commerce site experiences 7% lower conversion rates for just a 1-second delay in page responses. Companies often invest heavily in performance monitoring for their business-to-customer applications. But it’s much more...

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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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SaaS has some great benefits, such as hands-off management, user self-service and reduced dependence on hardware. It also brings some business considerations that are different from the ones of the past, when IT was run very differently. For example, off-premises apps command monthly subscription fees rather than a multi-year investment. They’re run entirely off-site, cutting down on hardware needs. There...

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Fall often has a New Year's feel to it, as kids head back to school and squirrels start stocking acorns for winter. It's a good time to reassess 2016 priorities and budgets and decide which projects can get done (or mostly done) by the end of the year, and see what priorities should take precedence before the new year (and a...

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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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As many of our customers have discovered, constant firefighting of performance issues is not a sustainable plan for growth. It’s a common predicament, though. In many data centers now, older legacy applications are running some business functions, while newer SaaS and web-based apps are running others. They’re on different networks, with entirely different architectures. But the goals of these old...

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This was a big one in the Wide World of Outages this week: Delta Airlines couldn’t get more than 1,500 planes off the ground because of a power outage in Atlanta. Well, that’s what initial reports said, but the Wall Street Journal went into the details about how some critical systems and equipment didn’t switch over to backups after power went...

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Happy Friday, all, and thanks for voting on the name of this weekly roundup blog post. The big winner was “Weekly Packet,” so let’s get started on volume two. AWS and other cloud adoption could rise in the wake of the Brexit decision over in Europe, as a Forbes contributor reports. I find this fascinating, since strict data regulations had...

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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...

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I’m often guilty of sticking my head in the sand, ignoring very small details that could turn into big problems later on. Like when Netflix told me my credit card was about to expire, but it seemed like such a boring task, so I ignored them…till the day Netflix stopped working. I grumbled at the TV for awhile, then wasted...

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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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Once found mostly in small- and medium-sized business environments, software as a service (SaaS) has now established itself firmly as the preferred solution for new software deployment in the enterprise. Concerns about security and control have been overshadowed by the low entry cost and fast ramp-up of SaaS solutions compared with in-house deployments. Marketing no longer has to wait weeks...

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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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The topic of why APM deployments fail comes up often. APM Digest did an article in 2012 providing 15 reasons offered by industry experts, and Jonah Kowall over at AppDynamics recently revisited the topic. Something’s in the water, apparently. From our point of view as an APM vendor, APM deployments don’t fail. APM is just one part of the monitoring...

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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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Many businesses these days are migrating to Office 365. It is important that when implementing a migration, they make sure the user experience is optimized both during the migration and afterwards. Gartner recently released a study indicating that, by 2017, 33% of all users will be on cloud-based business office systems such as Office 365. That’s because business cloud applications...

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More and more companies are implementing SaaS applications for conducting their most critical business processes. With SaaS apps, the IT department may not be responsible for providing technical support, but they are responsible for ensuring a positive experience for the end-users in their organization. We developed our SaaS Application Monitoring (SAM) solution to provide technology professionals with visibility into the...

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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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Whether you’re traveling for business or pleasure, one of the great wonders of the modern age is hotels that offer Wi-Fi. OK, I’ll grant you it’s not as wondrous as organ transplants or using a crane to lower a robot onto the surface of Mars. But when you get to your room and find that you can log in ok...

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When implementing new applications in their organization, IT departments are typically more concerned with security than performance, however they will find that upper management and, especially, the end-users won’t share this concern and give performance higher priority. This situation is the basis of the article, “Security vs. performance,” written by John Leonard and published in Computing magazine. The article discusses...

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Since performance is our niche, we’re always on the lookout for any articles, reports or blogs on the topic. A recent one that got our attention is “The Expanding Role of Application Performance Management,” written by Sebastian Kruk and published in CRM magazine. The article came with the sub-head, “Understanding and monitoring the end-user experience” – our bailiwick. The article...

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A recent survey of IT leaders that was reported in a ZDNet article entitled “PaaS may be a panacea for stressed-out developers,” found that 70% are either already using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions for application development or planning to implement them in the future. Since there is indeed plenty of pressure on developers to develop faster, PaaS can certainly help with...

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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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We’re always keeping watch for the latest analyst report on the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) market and few have caught our eye more than the report recently released by Gigaom Research entitled “Sector Roadmap: Application-management solutions for distributed and cloud environments.” Written by well-known APM expert, author and analyst, Bernd Harzog, the report delves into the numerous current challenges for...

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To monitor SaaS applications, IT teams have been using traditional application monitoring tools that are for monitoring internal applications — looking at servers and devices on the network to make sure they are functioning properly. However, SaaS applications aren’t on their network — they are over the Internet and in the cloud — making these tools insufficient for monitoring SaaS...

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Here at AppNeta we have a tradition of creating a Fantasy Football league every year.  Each year we decide who the commissioner is and then we start the grueling process of selecting draft order, league rules, team names, date of draft and most importantly selecting the platform to draft on.  Our league consists of members of the management, engineering, customer...

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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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AppNeta’s customers deploy thousands of appliances at customer locations across the globe. These appliances continuously collect data about target applications and networks, then store and analyze it from a cloud-based management system. Management of these appliances is not an easy task. They are often installed in remote locations where local IT staff is not readily available or not fully aware...

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When a Salesforce downtime occurs, it gets a lot of notice. You see it picked up on Twitter and in the press. With 93,000 customers around the globe, Salesforce is the poster child for SaaS services. Whenever there’s an issue, people start to question it and cloud services in general. If you look at the numbers, Salesforce is actually much...

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A recent analyst firm research paper commented that organizations that have the capability for measuring the quality of the end user experience are twice as likely as other companies to improve their brand reputation and 75% more likely to improve employee productivity. This comment validates that you need to measure the end-user experience, but it also suggests that if you...

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My previous post described our product pipeline at a high level. In this post i’ll focus on the first stage of the pipeline - the Inbox - and how we use Asana to initiate company-wide conversations about improvements to our products. As stated previously, the Inbox is where features / enhancements / ideas for the product are born. Anyone at AppNeta can...

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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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One of the many challenges facing organizations these days is that certain parts of the business are either moving to SaaS or is already in the cloud. This brings a unique problem for everyone responsible for maintaining the web applications' availability, performance, and functionality. Organizations often struggle to secure and protect business and customer data. In the past, all the...

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Only two years ago, the average company adopting SaaS applications was a 50-person company, mainly because smaller companies were inclined to not invest in on-premise solutions. Since then, there’s been a shift and SaaS has become the standard for any company implementing business applications or services. Even the largest companies in the world are now adopting SaaS applications and services,...

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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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As software continues to eat the world, ecommerce is starting to reflect the diversity of, well, commerce. But this growing market is also growing more competitive, so there’s a lot of interest in technologies that can help push businesses past razor-thin margins and into profitability. It’s great that “faster sites convert better” has become common knowledge, but stop there and...

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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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Living in Vancouver, surrounded by the natural beauty of British Columbia, it’s hard not to elicit a negative reaction (if not an outright protest march) when talking about a “pipeline”. But you’ll bear with me, right? AppNeta is a growing company with bright employees and savvy customers. But, like any company on the rise we’ve endured our share of growing pains....

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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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As an engineering team we strive to find the right balance between aggressively building out product capabilities and managing technical debt. At AppNeta we have hardened our process to define and manage this balance. Our current process involves virtual teams who break away from the feature development at hand to focus on technical debt in a specific product area for...

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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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Corrupted data is hard to detect since there is usually no direct indication in the logs. Many times when you notice corruption it is already too late because the machine doesn't boot up anymore or you suddenly can't run a command anymore which is essential for normal operation. Corruption itself is hard to prevent, esp. on flash hard drives. The...

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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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The Way Back Machine: APM Premise Software At AppNeta there was a time before SaaS. It too was a time of great engineering and building cool stuff. Back then we were still doing application performance monitoring and analysis. We required that our customers install our application (application server + network agents + users' clients) on their hardware sitting within their...

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Traversing a modern web site programmatically can be a tricky business. Gone are the days of static content, plain HTML forms, and simple web flows where one page transitions directly into the next. In its place is a constantly evolving landscape of rich javascript libraries, client side MVC, websockets, and websites that act progressively more like desktop applications than traditional...

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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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A Salesforce Performance Dashboard that Actually Measures the Performance to You Salesforce is the poster child for Saas services, and any company starting new customer-focused programs is very likely to have Salesforce at its core. With the Force.com ecosphere of thousands of partners and tens of thousands of add-ons and integrations, Salesforce is a critical for the 80,000+ business who...

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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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Gigaom Analysts Discuss Monitoring Performance in Today’s Complex Web and Mobile Application Environments BOSTON — December 5, 2013 — AppNeta, the technology leader of Full Stack Application Performance Management (APM) solutions, today announced a webinar on December 11th, 2013 hosted by AppNeta and Gigaom Research. This webinar, “Application Performance Monitoring in a Multi-platform App Environment,” will focus on the challenges...

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I consider myself fortunate to have now attended the first two AWS re:Invent Conferences. 2012 was notable for its impact as the first event, and 2013 did not disappoint with big crowds and lots of energy --  the show had it all! I attended many great sessions with some true thought leaders in the SaaS services market.  Andy Jassy lead...

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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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A question that many developers often ask is, “Can I make it run faster?” In particular, how can we discover the maximum performance of an individual MapReduce job?  Let’s set up a test run, and see how fast we can make it. We’ll base this analysis on native Hadoop components, however, the solution should extend to any Hadoop vendors. But first,...

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Last night, the United States Congress managed to avoid a default with a last-minute agreement. But the reboot’s still in progress, and many federal government servers and services remain shut down. The cause of the online blackout is this set of guidelines released by the Office of Management and Budget, and in particular their answer to this question: Q5: What...

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What is client latency? Let's face it, users are impatient. They demand a blazingly fast experience and accept no substitutes. Google performed a study in 2010 which proved that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. Speed as perceived by the end user is driven by multiple factors, including how fast results are returned and how long...

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Attention all iPhone and iPad users – you can now get network performance data from your iPhone and iPad! AppNeta’s new PathTest iOS app gives you easy access from your mobile device so you can assess, monitor and troubleshoot your network performance from anywhere in just seconds. PathTest iOS for iPad and iPhone can be easily downloaded for free in the App Store. PathTest iOS is a free tool...

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Last week, I presented Caching Up and Down the Stack at the Boston Web Performance meetup. It was great to get the chance to present to the 60+ people who came out for the talk. Unsurprisingly, many of the people there knew a lot about caching in all of the different levels I touched on, and some great conversation developed. I covered six of...

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IP SLA is a network monitoring capability deployed by Cisco-powered enterprises to measure several network health metrics between locations, but it’s far from a complete network performance monitoring tool. One of our financial service industry customers recently shared how they used PathView Cloud to pinpoint an unexpected WAN provider issue that was missed by IP SLA and PRTG. To review,...

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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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So we all know that the Baltimore Ravens are the 2013 Blackout…err…Super Bowl Champions. And debate will rage on about the “winners” of those Super Bowl commercials. Running away with the social media title this year was, without a doubt, Twitter. With the power outage that almost brought the Lombardi trophy to San Francisco (as a Steeler fan, I guess...

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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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Virtual Desktop Infrastructure seems to be popping up everywhere these days. I remember the days when RDP was used solely to save time from having to go down to the server room. Now it’s blossomed into a multibillion dollar industry with real businesses relying on it. Microsoft, VMware and Citrix, among others, are trying to put stakes in the VDI...

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2013 is poised to be an exciting and innovative year for technical professionals across roles and functions, regardless of their organization size. From emerging Software-Defined Networks, to mobile, BYOD and the solidification of cloud computing and SOA architectures, there are many upcoming trends that should impact your performance monitoring strategy in 2013. Are you ready to arm yourself with the...

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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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As distributed systems architectures become more complex and as organizations shift their infrastructure from on-premise hardware to the cloud, you need improved performance management tools to monitor your web applications! So we are here to help with a free eBook that outlines the key features and benefits of Application Performance Management solutions.  This Guide To Application Performance Management Technology, explores the different APM options available...

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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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I think it’s safe to say that everyone knows what happened yesterday – the U.S. Presidential Election. And while we were interested to see who would be named the winner, we were also interested in seeing how the election would affect end user experience of certain popular websites: mittromney.com; barrackobama.com; foxnews.com; nbcnews.com and cnn.com. Our AppView Web solution uses a...

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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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At 2PM EST yesterday (Tuesday, October 16th), I noticed something was a bit off with our virtual network performance management appliance hosted at GoGrid in California’s Bay Area.  I say “a bit off,” as in the appliance appeared completely offline. I tried logging into their management portal to no avail.  By looking at network paths monitored to the virtual appliance, we were...

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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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Now more than ever before, the management and reliable delivery of applications dictates business success. Application downtime leads to wasted employee time and thousands of negative customer experiences. When a retailer’s website loads slowly, sales are lost because the prospect is already 10 clicks away. You should never let your technology problems become business problems. When an application or network performs poorly,...

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In an era of new technologies and an ever-increasing presence of the Internet in ordinary life, the pressure to optimize Web performance for IT, development, business professionals and application owners has never been higher. Today, user satisfaction is everything: Your customer-facing Web application must perform seamlessly if you don’t want your customers to flee to the competition. Your mission-critical internal applications must...

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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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We averaged 3Mbps throughout the day from YouTube, for a total of 14GB. It would have maxed out our 3Mbps bonded T1 service at the old office, but our Comcast business connection held up well, even as traffic peaked at over 12Mbps in the early morning hours.

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The last thing any IT guy wants to hear from a group of sales reps is “Salesforce is down!  There’s something wrong with Salesforce!!!” Unfortunately, yours truly was in that position on Monday.The AppNeta sales team is an inside team based outside of Boston, Massachusetts.  On Halloween, at roughly 4pm EST, I heard the groans from the team that Salesforce was crawling....

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My name is Robb Corduck, I’m Vice President of AppNeta’s Regional Partner Business Unit. I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss an interesting and emerging go-to-market strategy that we are seeing with many of our PathView Cloud Partners.  As our Partners have quickly realized, PathView Cloud is particularly well suited to conduct pre-deployment or troubleshooting assessments for VoIP,...

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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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I don’t think I was alone June 21, 2012 when I went to check-in on Twitter during lunch and for some reason could not connect. Hmmm, how is that possible? The Twittersphere can’t actually be down…or can it? My office in Boston was also experiencing some network problems so I just assumed the Twitter issue was related to the Comcast...

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This is my third geeky post during my ’Impulsive Traveling 2012: Spain & Germany.’ I have been running a session of PathTest whenever I have WiFi connection! I am feeling very excited about finally starting my real traveling. I arrived in Madrid very late but getting through customs was super efficient. It also helped a lot that the non-European line was...

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Wi-Fi connections have become a traveling must-have. But it is very frustrating when the connections don’t work! While on a vacation in Europe, an AppNeta developer used PathTest, AppNeta’s free network capacity testing tool, to check the WiFi performance from common travel locations such as airports and hotels.  Follow this blog series as we track this globetrotter and the PathTest results....

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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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Here at AppNeta, we love it when a customer thanks us for helping them track down a hard-to-diagnose web performance problem. Over the past year, as we’ve helped more customers, we’ve noticed a few common patterns pop up, so we’re blogging about a few of them and their solutions. While every web stack is unique, when you start scaling there...

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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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Companies are increasingly adopting VoIP as their standard voice system. VoIP reduces costs and increases business efficiency. Yet, many organizations don’t realize that deploying VoIP can have unexpected complications when it comes to its impact on network performance and other existing applications. For IT teams, the task of transitioning physically separate voice and data networks onto a single shared infrastructure...

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Although virtualization is a cost-effective move for many organizations, it can also be a network management nightmare if the right steps aren’t taken before and during the deployment process. Even if network performance appears healthy, the strain of supporting a VDI deployment might prove otherwise. In these cases, it is not uncommon for companies to point the finger at the...

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If I had a nickel for every time I heard “We have enough bandwidth,” I would have enough money to buy the new iPad.  While this has not gotten me the iPad, it has given me some great insight into how important knowing your available and utilized bandwidth is to assuring network performance and delivering critical business services like VoIP,...

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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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With highly distributed network and the expansive transition to cloud services, network and application performance monitoring is becoming more and more challenging. With the increase in IP-based applications like VoIP, Video Conferencing, hosted CRMs, VDI and cloud services offering simpler and easier ways to communicate and operate within an organization. Each application comes with unique performance requirements and settings needed...

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Service-level agreements (SLAs) are an interesting concept because unless  there is a major disruption, it is difficult to guarantee they are being met daily. How do you know your carrier is meeting the requirements you are paying for? And if you  are a carrier, how can you prove to your clients that you are delivering the service as agreed? Network...

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‘Why Is Our Network Broken?’ Even companies that provide network performance management services still have to manage their own networks! So, a few weeks ago when I received notification that we were experiencing extremely low available bandwidth out to the internet, I knew I had to act fast to avoid failure of our critical services- The question was: which tool would solve the...

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As a network engineer for a global financial services organization, I know I am not alone in my daily concerns about network connection speed and performance.  Our concerns are all underscored by questions such as: ‘How much bandwidth are we getting?’ ‘What are we paying our ISP monthly again?’ ‘How are my end users using our bandwidth?’ ‘Why is my...

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In the age of smart phones, data plans and usage caps, many questions come up when looking into your cellphone bill.  It seems there are unlimited applications and features are swallowing up data. Have you ever wondered what else is using up your data? Checking mail, sending mail, playing games and using apps use data and affect your plan and...

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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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Conventional wisdom says that you can only see the true capacity of your network by flooding the pipe.  Well, we already put a stop to that thinking (see PathView Cloud).  However, we still understand that it is an effective method, if done right. With PathTest, the latest free tool from AppNeta, we can flood your network with any kind of...

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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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Every major wireless carrier is racing to deploy 4G branded mobile data services.  Although the mobile data user has been trained to lower his or her performance expectations, the wireless carriers are working hard to change that perception.  Can 4G wireless services support real time applications like voice and video for the mobile office of 1?  Can it replace more...

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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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