- Improving End-to-End Response Time
- In-Depth Analysis During Load Testing
- SOA Performance Management
- VoIP Deployment and Monitoring
- Data Center Migrations
- WAN Optimization and WAN Acceleration Deployment
Improving End-to-End Response Time
One of the top concerns in most organizations is the end-user experience and ensuring applications are performing well. Applications are tested in QA, but once they are rolled into production, most network managers have a difficult time measuring SLA compliance and only know there is a performance problem once they receive a call from the end-user that the network is slow. With web-based applications becoming so critical to organizations today, a negative user experience could lead to a major loss in revenue, because your customer left your website and went to your competitor’s. Improving the end-to-end response time of application performance is a high priority for most IT professionals.
Most organizations lack the visibility to answer the following questions:
- Do I have any problems with the network or the end user experience right now?
- If there is a problem, how bad is it?
- Who is affected by the problem?
- Is the problem temporary or chronic?
- What is actually the cause of the problem?
OPNET’s ACE Live is an end-user experience monitoring solution. It provides real-time, web-based dashboards that allow you to access performance metrics in order to answer these questions, before the end-user’s experience is affected. It also sends proactive alerts and notifications when pre-determined SLAs are not being met and tells you how often you are complying with your objectives. These dashboard reports and alerts provide the network manager with real-time visibility into end-user response time.
OPNET’s ACE Live also has the ability to capture a packet trace and seamlessly integrate with ACE Analyst to perform detailed, root-cause analysis and prediction. So, not only do you know what is going on with the network in real-time, but in a matter of minutes, you can troubleshoot to determine the cause of the problem, receive recommendations for how to resolve the issue, as well as perform “what if” analysis to determine how the fix will affect your SLAs.
OPNET’s ACE solutions provide the visibility into network and application performance in real-time so that critical applications are always meeting service level objectives, while ensuring a positive end-user experience.
In-Depth Analysis During Load Testing
When applications fail to scale efficiently after deployment, the time and resources expended on performance troubleshooting have a direct impact on an organization’s business goals. Traditionally, performance optimization requires multiple iterations between test and development teams for application choke-points to be identified and addressed. This often inefficient process can result in delayed deployments, with particularly challenging problems frequently left unresolved, or undiscovered, until production.
OPNET’s Panorama software embeds powerful heuristics and high resolution monitoring of systems and application metrics collected from the QA test lab to analyze application performance. Panorama goes beyond simple load testing to guide QA engineers to the root cause of a problem.
Panorama is helping organizations to:
- Realize speedier deployments
- Resolve problems more quickly
- Facilitate collaboration between the (often disparate) test, development, database, and web performance teams.
Panorama enables organizations to derive significant return on investment in the form of accelerated application deployments, smoother operations, and enhanced staff productivity, while managing costs.
SOA Performance Management
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) turns IT applications into composite applications, composed of many services often developed, tested, and deployed independently by separate development teams. While SOA applications are simpler to develop because they reuse existing services, the loose coupling of the component modules and services presents unique challenges to ensuring performance and scalability during production. End-to-end solutions for SOA performance management are required that address service quality across multiple SOA service implementations with real-time performance monitoring and diagnosis of root causes. A comprehensive SOA strategy requires analytics that enable both rapid troubleshooting and proactive prevention of problems.
OPNET’s unique end-to-end approach is particularly crucial in SOA environments, where the complexity of the distributed environment makes troubleshooting especially challenging and time-consuming. By providing deep visibility into application components and data flows, our solutions help developers and support engineers troubleshoot application response time delays due to unnecessary, inefficient, or mis-coded calls to internal and remote Web Services (e.g. SOAP, XML-RPC, REST).
OPNET’s ACE Live monitors application response times as seen by end users, and quantifies the contribution of Web Services tiers to end-to-end response time delay. ACE Analyst leverages a network perspective into application performance to visualize individual application messages exchanged between services and server tiers, leveraging detailed application and protocol decodes to provide visibility into code-level application statements. OPNET Panorama monitors performance across all application tiers, back-end databases and Web Services, providing deep visibility into Java and .NET components to pinpoint and address performance bottlenecks within the application code, and correlating web performance issues to root causes that originate on the back-end.
VoIP Deployment and Monitoring
Many organizations experience numerous challenges when implementing VoIP technology. As a network manager, you probably experience many of these issues such as:
- Finger pointing and blame when anything goes wrong
- Trying to achieve real-time performance from a best-effort network
- Managing the convergence and contention of voice and data on the same network
- Existing network management tools not providing the appropriate insight and troubleshooting of a converged network
As a result, managing a VoIP implementation is a guessing game. It is difficult for you to prove it’s not the network, or if it is, you can’t see how best to fix it.
OPNET’s APM solutions provide insight into the quality and root cause of problems and delays of VoIP deployments. ACE Live is a real-time end-user monitoring tool that displays key information to manage the complexity of combined data and voice traffic. ACE Live includes:
- The ability to supply real-time and historical data
- A business context to determine who is affected and which application is involved
- Measurements for both application performance and call quality
- Real-time monitoring of application traffic and voice calls
- Drill down capabilities to the underlying problem source (diagnostics)
OPNET’s APM solutions will reduce the cost of troubleshooting, improve end-to-end response time, and improve end-user satisfaction.
Data Center Migrations
As business applications grow in complexity, there is an increased requirement for improved tools and processes to support performance issues associated with application migrations. These applications require not only deeper diagnostic tools to more quickly pinpoint the root-cause of production issues, but more importantly, tools that will allow for the proactive analysis of application performance, so problems can be detected and fixed before they are ever introduced to the production environment.
OPNET’s ACE Live enables organizations to discover critical applications and traffic flows. The ACE Live appliances can be easily installed at critical traffic points in your network to automatically baseline the performance of your most critical applications.
OPNET’s ACE Analyst software provides the functionality to test critical applications to determine their performance in the new environment, before making any changes in production. ACE Analyst allows for application performance to be tested in the proposed environment, including testing a new version of an application, physical relocation of server hardware, or outsourcing of your applications to a 3rd party environment. You will now be aware of which applications will perform poorly, with enough time to investigate possible solutions and avoid negative impact on the business units that use the applications. Analysis can be done to see if servers should be co-located, bandwidth increased, or if technologies like application acceleration may offer benefits—all before making any changes to the applications.
Using the ACE solutions will result in reduced costs of troubleshooting, fewer application outages and slow downs, improved end-to-end response time, and improved end-user satisfaction.
WAN Optimization and WAN Acceleration Deployment
Enterprise network managers trying to improve application performance are faced with many different application acceleration and WAN optimization technologies, but their tools, techniques, and training often aren’t sufficient to let them make a choice with the confidence that it’s the right one. In such a fast-changing market, it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of confusion about the various technologies available, what situations each is best at addressing, how to evaluate them, how to justify a purchase, and how to manage the chosen solution on an ongoing basis.
Some questions, that network managers might ask are:
- How do I choose the correct optimization technology?
- What metrics are important?
- How will I know if a solution worked or not?
- How do they affect my WAN or other parts of my infrastructure?
- How can I prove the benefits?
- Will multiple solutions cancel each other out?
- How do I ensure a solution keeps working as my network changes?
OPNET’s ACE Analyst provides the ability to measure the effect of WAN acceleration or WAN optimization solutions, compare the actual benefits of competing solutions, and manage a solution once installed. ACE Live provides monitoring and visibility into a WAN optimized network. OPNET’s APM solutions monitor and troubleshoot a WAN accelerated environment and also ensure that you are experiencing the benefit you desire, post deployment.