Service Delivery Management
Achieve a unified view of the service delivery environment that extends from the data centre, to the network, to the users
To address today’s pervasive service delivery challenges, the IT organization requires contextual insight into the health of service delivery that aligns business objectives with how users consume services. Leveraging the Unified Service Delivery Management framework from NetScout allows enterprise organizations to construct a dynamic, scalable and sustainable approach to service delivery management that aligns IT with business objectives and improves service quality and reliability.
NetScout solutions provide a unified view of the service delivery environment that extends from the data center, to the network, to the users. This unified view enables IT organizations to address business and technology challenges in the following ways:
- Assure business service continuity?
- Achieve optimal user experience
- Optimize service delivery performance?
- Better leverage existing infrastructure
- ?Simplify managing service delivery?
- Reduce complexity?
- Lower the overall total cost of IT operations
Leveraging advanced packet flow technologies, NetScout solutions provide greater visibility in more places to effectively monitor, analyze and assure the end-to-end performance of applications and services for enterprise, government and service providers. This deep visibility delivers better business value, improves the user experience, enhances existing technology investments, and simplifies the management of IP service delivery. The NetScout Unified Service Delivery Management brings rapid return on investment while dramatically enhancing organizational agility, allowing the IT organization to:
- Optimize the service delivery environment, better leverage existing investments, and roll out new services with confidence?
- Protect network and application performance, and assure the quality of user experience?
- Simplify operations, improve workflow, consolidate tools, improve efficiency and collaboration and lower the overall cost of IT operations
Service Assurance
Always-on network and application visibility with service-oriented analysis
The nGenius® Service Assurance Solution is a unified service delivery management platform providing comprehensive, real-time network, application and service performance intelligence that allows the IT organization to assure optimized network and application performance and quality of experience. The nGenius Service Assurance Solution provides always-on network and application visibility with a common and consistent view of service-oriented analysis. Robust reporting functions increase productivity and collaboration across the IT organization with team-oriented workflows.
Solution capabilities include:
- Unified aggregate service views with intelligent, automated anomaly detection to understand service-level performance and predict network, application, and service performance degradations to minimize or avoid service impacting degradations
- Network, application and service performance management with unified real-time and historical views, giving critical visibility into today’s most complex service delivery environments
- Packet-level forensic analysis for deep-packet visibility and granular back-in-time historical analysis to resolve the most difficult application and service delivery problems
- Planning and optimization capabilities displays how resources are being consumed and reveals capacity shortfalls to keep service delivery environments running at peak efficiency and performance levels
- Service and policy validation delivers key metrics and insight into the service delivery environment to validate the impact of the implementation of new network optimization and policies for applications and services
Unified insight into the service delivery environment simplifies managing service delivery complexities with relevant, service-oriented insight that aligns with how the business consumes these services to efficiently deliver consistent and high-quality service levels. A unified framework for service delivery management helps the organization lower the total cost of IT operations by consolidating operations into a single unified tool set that yields connected and meaningful metrics that can be leveraged across the entire organization. This improves IT staff productivity and collaboration, and enables better cross-functional leverage of management tool investments.
User Experience Management
Protect availability and performance, and achieve the best possible user experience
Service quality cannot be assured unless service management is comprehensively centered on the end user. Today’s business services are no longer comprised of a single application, but rather a collection of applications, middleware, network elements and technology enablers that work in unison. The resulting complexity of services, combined with the underlying network foundation, can create significant challenges for IT organizations. Built on the ability to collect, correlate, analyze and report on mass volumes of packet-flow data at a granular level, the nGenius® Service Assurance Solution provides unified visibility into end-to-end service delivery in context with how services are delivered and consumed to more effectively manage the user experience.
The nGenius solution closes the gap between the network and business services to deliver timely and actionable management insight to effectively assure service levels and protect the user experience.
IT organizations can:
- Leverage intelligent early warning capabilities to predict and resolve application performance degradations before the user is impacted.
- Accelerate application problem resolution using always-on, intelligent deep packet capture and analysis for extensive back-in-time forensic analysis
- Optimize application response times by understanding how resources are being consumed to avoid quality of experience issues
- Make better-informed decisions about the applications that drive the business and assure end-users have access to the services meet business objectives.
The nGenius Service Assurance solution allows the IT organization to more efficiently maintain the integrity of service delivery and the quality of the user experience, freeing time to focus on strategic projects rather than reacting to problems.
Performance and Availability Management
More visibility in more places to effectively monitor, analyze, and assure the end-to-end performance of applications and services
Building on the ability of the nGenius Service Assurance Solution to collect, correlate, analyze and report on mass volumes of packet-flow data, NetScout nGenius® and Sniffer® products allows you to predict and prevent performance and availability problems before they occur — across your diverse IT infrastructure. The nGenius Service Assurance Solution provides more visibility in more places to deliver the most complete picture of application utilization and responsiveness.
The nGenius Service Assurance Solution monitors and supports:
- More than 200 well-known applications?
- Complex applications that use a range of ports, such as SAP, Citrix or .NET?
- Custom applications designed specifically for your business?*Broadcast, multicast and unicast applications
- Applications in virtualized server environments?
- Web-based applications identified by URLs?
- Next-generation communication applications, such as VoIP, video, instant messaging, and peer to peer
The NetScout Solution provides comprehensive network performance monitoring views – ranging from application traffic flows to full packet payload details – in the core, distribution and access areas of the network as well as within virtualized data center environments – to help you effectively monitor and troubleshoot the network services you deliver to the business.
This detailed visibility enables IT staff to:
- Predict application performance degradations and quickly resolve issues using automated, intelligent anomaly detection before they become bigger problems?
- Manage application performance organization wide using unified real-time and historical views
- Accelerate application problem resolution using always-on, Intelligent Deep Packet Capture and Analysis for extensive back-in-time forensic analysis
- Optimize application response times by understanding how resources are being consumed to avoid quality of experience issues
- Make better informed decisions about the applications that drive the business and assure end-users have access to the services to meet their business goals
Network and Service Optimization
Assuring the business is optimized for critical services
Network capacity planning is about balancing the needs and expectations of your network users with the realities of budgeting. To manage network capacity efficiently, it’s not enough to measure overall traffic utilization. Network managers need insight into what applications are using the link, when those applications are active, and who is using those applications. Without information on which applications are consuming bandwidth, corporations are forced to blindly upgrade to higher and higher speed networks and absorb higher operational costs.
The nGenius Service Assurance Solution enables network managers to analyze and report growth trends and usage patterns to make decisions about optimizing bandwidth, rescheduling activities or reallocating traffic. In addition to enterprise-wide baselines and forecasts, the nGenius Service Assurance Solution goes beyond basic utilization to identify the applications that consume bandwidth. The nGenius Service Assurance Solution helps network managers:
- Assure the network is optimized for business-critical services by identifying where resources are over- and under-utilized and adjusting to properly balance the workload?
- Proactively combat network congestion by reporting on bandwidth growth and forecasting capacity shortfalls
- Gain quantifiable business justification by understanding and reporting on which applications consume your network resources in order to postpone upgrades and justify growth & policy decisions
- Tune traffic to optimize resources by identifying over- and under-utilized (physical and logical) segments so you can redistribute load and balance costs ?
- Baseline current traffic patterns and response times to ensure new applications can be supported during peak activity periods and to watch for changes over time?
- Plan enterprise-wide network capacity with a unified service assurance solution that will support all data sources and network types from the core to access layers to virtualized computing environments
Dashboard and Analytics
Unified visibility into end-to-end service delivery in context with how services are delivered and consumed to more effectively manage the user experience
The nGenius® Service Assurance Solution includes a real-time service dashboard that provides unified visibility into end-to-end service delivery in context with how services are delivered and consumed to more effectively manage the user experience. Building on the nGenius Service Assurance Solution’s ability to collect, correlate, analyze and report on mass volumes of packet-flow data, nGenius Service Delivery Manager closes the gap between the network and business services to deliver timely and actionable management insight to effectively assure service levels.
This new service-oriented dashboard combines real-time and historical views of user-defined service domains, simplifying the view into the health and availability of delivered services. The dashboard automates the detection of service quality problems and emerging security threats across physical, virtual and cloud-based services from the application hosting environment, through the network, to the user.
Capabilities include:
- Dynamically display data with relevant views and information based on selected domain or service
- Quickly and easily navigate with single-point-of-reference for intuitive visualization of service health
- Automate analysis and detects anomalies with robust analytics
- Detect unauthorized social networking activity, streaming video and unauthorized logins
- Access real-time and historical service performance visibility with easily understood actionable data
- Quickly spot anomaly trends and degradations to prevent service meltdowns
Network Forensics
Forensic capabilities that allow you to go back in time to discover the root cause
The Sniffer® Analysis software suite provides a direct connection to nGenius® InfiniStream® appliances for highly optimized forensic analysis and packet data mining to fully exploit the valuable information contained within network packets. The Sniffer Analysis software suite can be deployed on a standalone basis or in concert with the comprehensive nGenius Service Assurance Solution. When deployed in a standalone mode, Sniffer Analysis provides unsurpassed segment-by-segment deep packet analysis and troubleshooting capabilities by leveraging any number of nGenius InfiniStream appliances deployed across the network. The Sniffer Analysis software suite provides a powerful view deep into IP network packets, revealing granular information about network and application interactions and response time and latency metrics.
All nGenius InfiniStream appliances continuously capture and record packet streams on critical network links so that when a subtle or intermittent problem occurs, you can quickly go back in time to discover the root cause.
Sniffer Analysis software analysis tools provide the flexibility to:
- Investigate post-incident, needle-in-the-haystack issues
- Use a direct-connect graphical data mining interface to quickly and intuitively search through Terabytes of packet and statistical history or drill down to the specific conversations using nGenius Performance Manager Focus down to micro-second granularity and launch a packet decode for the most subtle problems
- Reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) for reported problems
- Minimize network impact of packet analysis with a superior architecture for high-performance, on-appliance packet analysis
Predictive Analysis
Predict and prevent problems before they impact the business
In today’s rapidly evolving technology environment, the IT organization is charged with delivering applications and services to users in a predictable, reliable and cost-effective way. High speed, global networks are host to complex, revenue-carrying financial trading services, virtualized, Web-based order processing applications, patient-care electronic records and medical images, and converged, latency-intolerant voice and video. These business services represent millions of dollars in client portfolios, high-value product revenue, safe and rapid patient treatment, and quality phone conversations with customers and partners. Disruptions as minor as millisecond delays, or as dramatic as hours of complete application unavailability result in severe financial loss, irreparable customer dissatisfaction, and health implications.
Network and application analysis products from NetScout provide deployment proven, valuable insight into the dynamic nature of data, voice and video running across modern IP networks. The Service Assurance Solution from Netscout includes portable field service tools, dedicated hot-spot segment-by-segment deep packet analysis, and end-to-end always-on service assurance with intelligent early warning capabilities. These solutions enable IT staff to predict, preempt and resolve network and service delivery problems while facilitating the optimization and capacity planning of the network infrastructure, and protecting the user.
The result is better end-to-end service delivery knowledge to optimize and protect the delivery of business services, while also predicting and preventing service impacting issues. This allows the IT organization to more efficiently maintain the integrity of service delivery and the quality of the user experience, freeing time to focus on strategic projects rather than reacting to problems.”
Predictive analysis allows the IT organization to:
- Identify abnormal increases and decreases in physical and virtual link utilization, application utilization, application response time and VoIP quality.
- Associate anomalous traffic with offending applications to focus troubleshooting efforts and shorten mean time to repair.
- Identify short-lived problems, intermediate-term issues, and hard-to-catch, long-term performance drifts.
- Provide increased visibility into all monitored interfaces, including trunks, virtual interfaces, sites and QoS levels.
- Combine related anomalies into a single, intelligent alert to streamline the process of diagnosing multiple alerts generated from the same root cause
Virtualization Management
Comprehensive, unified view of service delivery of application and network performance for virtual environments
The NetScout nGenius® Service Assurance Solution provides a comprehensive, unified view of service delivery of application and network performance across virtual and physical environments that enables IT organizations to optimize data center infrastructure investments, protect against service degradations, and simplify the operation of complex, multi-tier application environments. The nGenius Service Assurance Solution enables IT organizations to monitor and manage application delivery in virtual computing environments with the same granular visibility as they have with physical server applications.
The nGenius Service Assurance Solution extends core NetScout data abstraction technology inside virtualized physical servers and correlates performance metrics across hundreds of intelligent data sources to provide end-to-end visibility into service delivery. Behavior analytics and alerts allow IT managers to detect new virtual application instances and track dynamic location changes that would be otherwise difficult to determine. This correlation and visibility into data center services enables customers to optimize virtual infrastructure investments, protect against virtualized service degradations, and simplify the operation of complex virtual and physical environments.
Optimization and Capacity Planning
Aligning the needs of network users to the realities of your IT budget
Network capacity planning is about aligning the needs of your network users with the realities of your IT budget. To efficiently manage network capacity requires keen insight into application usage. The nGenius® Service Assurance Solution provides robust reporting features that analyze growth trends and usage patterns and allow informed decisions about bandwidth optimization, rescheduling activities or reallocating traffic. In addition to enterprise-wide baselines and forecasts, the nGenius Service Assurance Solution goes beyond basic utilization metrics to identify the applications that consume bandwidth.
The nGenius Service Assurance Solution helps network managers:
- Assure the network is optimized for business-critical services by identifying how resources are utilized and adjusting to properly balance the workload
- Proactively combat network congestion by reporting on bandwidth growth and forecasting capacity shortfalls
- Gain quantifiable business justification by understanding and reporting applications consume consumption to postpone upgrades and justify growth and policy decisions
- Tune traffic to optimize resources by identifying physical and logical segments to redistribute load and balance costs
- Understand baseline current traffic patterns and response times to ensure that new applications can be supported during peak activity periods and monitored for changes over time
- Plan enterprise-wide network capacity with a unified service assurance solution that supports all data sources and network types from the core to access layers to virtualized computing environments
Unified Communications
Eliminate the complexity of voice, data, and video with relevant service oriented insight that aligns with how the business consumes these services
As IT organizations combine IP telephony, video conferencing, instant messaging, email, presence, and communication-enabled business applications to support unified communications, monitoring the “moving parts” remains profoundly difficult. The nGenius® Service Assurance Solution from NetScout embraces the complexities of Unified Communications service delivery management to provide unprecedented visibility and relevant service-oriented insight that aligns with how the business consumes critical business services.
The nGenius solution enables the IT organization to achieve peak operating efficiencies, protect the user experience, deliver consistent and reliable service levels by predicting and preventing performance issues, and simplify the management of complex, high-performance environments.
Field Service Troubleshooting
Rapidly respond to network and application issues in wired and wireless networks with Sniffer Portable Analyzer
Field support technicians are dispatched at minute’s notice to remote locations or temporary worksites to deploy and troubleshoot new technologies and applications, manage and validate infrastructure changes, and resolve network and application performance issues. NetScout provides comprehensive, on-demand monitoring, packet capture and troubleshooting tools for wired and wireless network segments that enable field technicians to rapidly respond and resolve network and application issues that they encounter in the field.
The Sniffer® Portable Analyzer family provides plug-and-play protocol analysis for wired and wireless networks. A single, unified solution that performs on-demand monitoring, packet capture and troubleshooting, the Sniffer Portable Analyzer family is the ideal tool for rapid response to network and application field issues.
Both the single-user Sniffer Portable Professional Analyzer and the enterprise-class, multi-user Sniffer Global portable analyzers can be used to:
- Rapidly identify network and application performance issues over wired and wireless networks
- Deploy and troubleshoot new technologies, applications or services—in production and prior to roll-out
- Manage and validate infrastructure changes
- Analyze and validate security threats on wired and wireless network links as well as the wireless control infrastructure
- Locate mobile wireless devices on a physical map, using integrated Cisco® Mobility Services Engine data