News
Why is an integrated network health solution critical?
December 2014 by Marc Jacob
Networks have become a strategic business asset that glues together the data, the applications, and the users. With networks and data centres at the heart of critical activities, end-users expect consistent, high-quality applications delivery at all times. It is no longer sufficient to troubleshoot performance problems after they have impacted business activities negatively. Integrated network health solutions must expose imminent issues proactively, before they degrade to become costly problems.
“In the same way that healthcare professionals consider proactive measures to be an economic and therapeutic enabler of good health, network professionals want to identify issues as early as possible - not after-the-fact, when their impact is costly,” said Dr. Rony Kay, Founder and CEO of cPacket Networks. “For example, though treating a heart-attack is possible, it is better to identify early indicators of deteriorating conditions and mitigate them.” Like health professionals, network professionals need situational awareness and granular performance indicators to identify telltale signs of deteriorating conditions and address them before they negatively impact the end-users.
Historically, network monitoring tools were designed to troubleshoot performance problems after-the-fact - relying on information that is neither granular nor real-time. This forces network professionals to conduct forensic investigations after the damage is done, instead of proactively identifying imminent issues and taking corrective actions to mitigate them.
This after-the-fact approach doesn’t scale to the current operational needs for efficiency, reliability, and consistency. Modern applications-delivery environments require a unified solution, which has been architected from ground up to provide Integrated Network Health by combining proactive and reactive measures. The integrated framework should include: real-time key-performance-indicators (KPIs), proactive alerts about spikes and abnormal applications behaviours, interactive search of any traffic pattern across the entire environment, triggered interception of suspected traffic, and high-speed traffic recording for forensic investigations. It should be coupled with algorithms for advanced analytics, visualisation, and drill-down search.
cPacket’s focus is delivering solutions for Integrated Network Health. The company developed a unique hardware-software architecture, which combines distributed real-time network intelligence and enables forensic investigations in a unified framework. Network managers can leverage timely and relevant information to identify imminent issues before they degrade to become costly disruptions. For example, cPacket’s solution can base-line critical metrics of latency, jitter, and application response times; alert about abnormal behaviors like microbursts and spikes; and launch distributed real-time pattern-search for any traffic profiles or error conditions across the entire network environment.
“cPacket has integrated proactive and reactive elements of network health in a unified framework,” said Kay. “This combination enables our customers, from service providers to financial institutions, government organisations and enterprise, to benefit from higher operational efficiency, better traffic engineering and performance optimisations, and shorter time-to-resolution of problems which impact critical business activities.”
