Archive of posts with tag 'monitoring technology'

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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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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Artificial intelligence has dominated many IT headlines this year. One theory on why AI is taking off now is that its predictive capabilities are becoming popular in this data-driven world. It’s getting better and more business-worthy, too. Salesforce recently announced Einstein, an AI addition to its product that promises customer personalization via machine learning. The financial trend is positive, too:...

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

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Modern IT metrics encompass a lot of measurements, from throughput and latency to capacity and error rates. In a complicated technology world, the question of which metrics to track has gotten more complicated too. It’s just one more challenge in a challenging IT environment. And businesses and their IT teams can’t spend all their time tracking every metric. A simplified...

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The modern IT network encounters a lot of twists and turns on its way to high performance and user satisfaction. The humble network, which for a long time was fairly straightforward, is now a complicated infrastructure component that requires careful management and monitoring. Private and public network topologies are much more diverse these days, so that app delivery takes many...

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

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A service-level agreement sounds suspiciously like paperwork, which, to me anyway, sounds either boring or easy to ignore, or both. But service-level agreements (SLAs) can’t be ignored. This particular form of paperwork comes in many flavors, and affects IT in some important ways. Generally, an SLA stands as a reminder and guarantee of what a customer should receive from a...

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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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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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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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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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Yesterday was Go Slow Day on the Internet. As lawmakers consider the latest arguments on how much control ISPs should be allowed to exert over the networks that support the wider internet, websites like Reddit, Etsy, and Vimeo are staging a protest. Yesterday, they committed to slowing down their main sites, giving users a glimpse into what the internet would...

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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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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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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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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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It’s Chinese New Year - Year of Horse. This used to be one of the best business time of the year for Telecom operators, in China for example. Traditionally, Chinese people took this time for family gathering, friendship bonding, just like westerners at Christmas. Being a “connection-oriented” society - meaning whom you know and what kind of relationship you have...

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

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

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

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

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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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The fine folks over at KissMetrics put together a stunning infographic on just how important this performance stuff is. It's easy to get caught up in shipping features and polishing UX, but sometimes, the low-hanging fruit is the first performance step, not the 50th A/B test. Check it out below (click for a larger version) -- how does your website...

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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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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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