TechGuide

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EDITORS NOTE
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ENTERPRISE
WAN STRATEGY
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APPLICATION
PERFORMANCE
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NETWORK
VIRTUALIZATION
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Network Monitoring
and Management
This TechGuide explores the driving trends of advanced WAN management
and monitoring tools growth, the impact of virtualization and understanding
how the new generation of WAN management and monitoring tools can help
you achieve optimum performance.
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2 NETWORK MONI TORI NG AND MANAGEMENT
1
EDITORS NOTE
A New Generation of Management
and Monitoring Tools Emerge
Ten years ago, network management and
network monitoring were two sides of the same
coin. Both operations were critically important,
but because each one was based on separate
and often proprietary tools, getting a central-
ized view of both processes wasnt easy.
Today, network managers know they must
have a comprehensive converged management
and monitoring toolset to provide the real-time
performance data they need.
That requirement has been driven by several
trends, among them the need to monitor net-
work devices and boundary performance, the
and ensure WAN service-level agreement com-
pliance. Application performance monitoring
(APM), meanwhile, has evolved into a thriving
mission-critical business segment of its own.
A full-featured APM product should not only
register where performance is suffering, but
pinpoint where a problem may lie.
Yet even as identifying network performance
issues becomes more critical, the expansion
of virtualizationfrom servers to network
devicesthreatens to make the task more
challenging
As a result, its critical for network admin-
istrators to deploy monitoring and perfor-
mance tools that can track both physical host
resources and virtualized network infrastruc-
ture assets, especially as application-aware and
software-dened networking deployments gain
traction.
There is a lot to like and a lot to know about
the new generation of WAN management and
monitoring tools. This TechGuide helps you
understand how these tools have evolved and
gives network managers insight into how they
can ensure optimum performance at their orga-
nization. n
Chuck Moozakis
Site Editor, Networking Media Group
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3 NETWORK MONI TORI NG AND MANAGEMENT
2
ENTERPRISE
WAN STRATEGY
The Enterprise WAN Network
Monitoring Strategy Evolution
The discrepancy between network moni-
toring and management has blurred now that
technology, service and labor changes have
taken place in the enterprise. This change re-
quires an update to your WAN network moni-
toring strategy.
HOW A WAN NETWORK MONITORING
STRATEGY HAS CHANGED
Network connections are the fabric that de-
livers IT services and supports collaborative
relationships in the enterprise, and any failure
in the network is likely to cut users off from
critical applications and destroy team produc-
tivity. From the onset of enterprise networking,
a critical requirement for network operations
managers and planners has been to monitor
network behavior to detect trends that could
compromise performance and to respond
to problems proactively. This requirement
remains real today, but the way it is addressed
is evolving under the pressure of technology,
service and even labor changes.
One reection of the evolution of monitor-
ing is its collision with network management.
A WAN network monitoring strategy has al-
ways required the analysis of trafc in real
time, but most management systems support
at least some form of real-time trafc analy-
sis too; so the distinction between monitoring
and management may become more cloudy. As
network management systems improve, in fact,
monitoring has tended to focus on areas where
general statistical information about network
performance may not be enough.
WHAT SHOULD YOUR WAN NETWORK
MONITORING STRATEGY ACCOMPLISH?
Most enterprises link WAN network monitor-
ing with one or more of three specic missions:
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4 NETWORK MONI TORI NG AND MANAGEMENT
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ENTERPRISE
WAN STRATEGY
n Application monitoring: Monitoring at the
application level to measure the service qual-
ity actually delivered to the application. This
is growing out of a need by network and IT
management to provide specic performance
guarantees to line departments they serve.
n Network device monitoring: Monitoring at
the device level to determine the health of
network components and the extent to which
their performance matches capacity plans
and intra-enterprise service-level agreements
(SLAs). This is the primary focus of network
monitoring for enterprises with large net-
work investments.
n Boundary monitoring: Monitoring at the
trunk/connection level to detect faults, man-
age SLA commitments by WAN service pro-
viders/vendors, and troubleshoot in the case
of failures. This boundary monitoring is
on the rise as enterprises adopt increasingly
complex IP and Ethernet services whose SLA
terms are more complicated to verify.
WHAT FORM SHOULD YOUR WAN
NETWORK MONITORING TOOL TAKE?
For each of these WAN monitoring strategies,
there are two high-level options:
n A device or interfaces management informa-
tion base (MIB) can be monitored.
Or
n A probe can be used to gather specic infor-
mation at a lower level, perhaps even inde-
pendent of the devices involved.

Network management tended to be based on
Simple Network Management Protocol and on
Boundary monitoring is on the rise as enterprises adopt
increasingly complex IP and Ethernet services whose SLA
terms are more complicated to verify.
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2
ENTERPRISE
WAN STRATEGY
MIBs ten years ago, while network monitoring
tended to be based on proprietary probes and a
separate set of central tools to analyze the data.
The desire to centralize all network man-
agement/monitoring tools into a single cohe-
sive application set has converged monitoring
and management at the network operations
level. As enterprises have moved to deploy
management strategies, theyve adopted a
strategy of using a high-level console to display
network health overall, with the ability to drill
down to isolate specic problems. HPs Open-
View platform is an example of a management
console that can integrate both high-level man-
agement and lower-level monitoring tools.
Tom Nolle
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6 NETWORK MONI TORI NG AND MANAGEMENT
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APPLICATION
PERFORMANCE
Evaluating Your Application Performance
Monitoring and Management Options
Ultimately, the work of IT is about pro-
viding services to users, and the primary ser-
vicesfrom a users perspectiveare storage
and applications. Users notice only a few things
about applications, most of which boil down to
two questions:
1. Does the application do what I want well?
2. Does the application do what I want
quickly?
So, delivering applications with good perfor-
mance is a key indicator of ITs performance.
Thus, IT has great interest in application de-
livery optimization and in application perfor-
mance monitoring and management (APM).
WHAT APM DOES
APM approaches application performance
management from several perspectives:
n Server: How does an application perform
with respect to its use of compute, memory
and storage resources? Does it use them
in ways that waste no more than is accept-
able and deliver acceptable response time?

n Network: How do trafc ows between
the user and application front tier act
on the network? How do ows between
application tiers and application compo-
nents behave?

n Desktop: How does the application desktop
client perform?
The goal, of course, is to be able to say how
well applications are performing, and if they
are not performing well, where the problem
lies. Your application performance monitor-
ing and management solution should be able
to pinpoint whether the problem lies:
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APPLICATION
PERFORMANCE
n in the architecture and provisioning of the
application;
n in the network between users and apps; or
n on the client side.
Having gured out where a problem lies can
be critical to taking successful corrective action
and to not wasting resources xing the wrong
things.
CHOOSING AN APM PRODUCT
One of the key decisions to make is whether
to run application performance monitoring
with or without agents. An application per-
formance monitoring product with agents
involves software on servers and clients or
specialized hardware in the network, whereas
agentless APM does not use management
agents on systems or the network. Agentless
monitoring can be passive (examining net-
work packets for information about what
applications are doing) or active (using stan-
dard data access protocols such as Simple
Network Management Protocol and Windows
Management Instrumentation to poll servers
and switches and routers for information).
Using an agent can get the most information,
but also entails installation of the agents,
complicating conguration management and
subsequent software lifecycle management for
the agents, which can introduce additional
cost and effort. Going agentless limits you to
the data available via standard management
interfaces.
WHERE TO LOOK IN YOUR APM
However you approach APM, it is increasingly
important to look at the entire range of behav-
ior, from server and network hardware all the
way up to application protocols and specic
Having gured out where a problem lies can be critical
to taking successful corrective action and to not wasting
resources xing the wrong things.
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APPLICATION
PERFORMANCE
application operations (i.e., how specic com-
mands and transactions perform and how cli-
ent and server communicate).
Application performance problems can arise
at any layer. A network card or router interface
card may be malfunctioning, or two devices
connected to one another may not be com-
municating properly due to miscongurations.
Problems not rooted in the network can result
from poor application architecture or coding.
Understand that it can be very difcult to
direct corrective action toward those causes
without being able to rule out the network. It
may be necessary in some environments to run
specialized code to track the performance of
individual applications running on the server
and even of modules or routines within the
applicationsto understand application per-
formance problems.
Ultimately, ensuring application delivery re-
quires APM at some level, either to determine
a baseline of good performance when things
are working well, for future comparisonor
to identify the causes of problems, direct their
solution, and verify their having been resolved.
John Burke
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NETWORK
VIRTUALIZATION
Maximizing Network Virtualization
Efforts in the Enterprise
Nearly 60% of organizations have noted a
slowdown in their virtualization initiatives,
according to a recent Nemertes Research study.
The complexity of systemsspecically the
complexity of network congurationsis often
cited as a key barrier to the continued adoption
of virtual networks. The ability for enterprises
to congure virtual networks and to fully de-
ne these congurations in software is the
key to boosting virtualized network adoption
again. As your organizations network virtu-
alization effort goes forward, here are some
tips that should help you maximize those ef-
forts and tie them into server and storage
virtualization.
n TIP 1: EVALUATE YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL
STRUCTURE AND OPTIMIZE YOUR NETWORK
POLICIES AND PROCEDURES
Advancements in storage, server and network
virtualization have allowed enterprises to do
things in the data center that simply werent
possible on a physical network. Yet the sepa-
ration in many organizations between IT
and network teams hasnt enabled them to
reap the full rewards of these new capabi-
lities. Many network teams view virtualiza-
tion as the responsibility of the server team
and are not in a hurry to embrace virtualized
switches or virtual network appliances. Many
are still happy to have trafc come out of the
virtual infrastructure, route it through physi-
cal network components and then go back into
virtual space. IT organizations should make
sure that the roles, responsibilities, policies
and procedures of these teams are claried
and revised to embrace virtualizations capa-
bilities. Its only a matter of time before virtu-
alization takes hold in networking the way
it has with servers and storage, so resistance
is futile.
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nTIP 2: CONSIDER YOUR MONITORING TOOLS
AND YOUR MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK
Traditional monitoring tools and management
frameworks have struggled to keep up with the
adoption of server virtualization. Network vir-
tualization only adds to these challenges. Now
is an excellent time to reevaluate your moni-
toring tools and management framework. Using
virtualization as a catalyst, consider how you
can create an integrated single-pane-of-glass
view of servers and virtualized network infra-
structure that can and will be sharing physical
host resources with other workloads, moving
from place to place, or spread across internal
data centers and public or private clouds.
nTIP 3: EMBRACE OPEN STANDARDS
WHENEVER POSSIBLE
Cisco and VMware are clearly leading in the
market share battle for data center virtual-
ization, virtual switching and programmable
networks, and they will likely have signicant
market positions in software-dened network-
ing (SDN). Both have vowed to support open
standards such as OpenFlow and OpenStack.
Yet their current products and roadmaps dont
necessarily enforce these standards. Enter-
prises should consider whether any purchase
decisions might lead them further down the
path of being locked into a proprietary solu-
tion. Both of these vendors are quick to point
out all the advanced features and capabilities
their proprietary products can deliver. Dont
take the bait. Opt instead for an open standards
approach that wont limit your options. As a
side benet, embracing open standards should
simplify the transition of applications to or
from cloud environments.
nTIP 4: START EVALUATING AND PLANNING
FOR SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING
SDN is the next major trend in enterprise IT.
Embracing open standards should simplify the transition
of applications to or from cloud environments.
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NETWORK
VIRTUALIZATION
The adoption of SDN will balloon over the next
three years. SDN supports virtual networks, but
organizations are struggling to assess the roles
of SDN and other network virtualization tech-
niques in their current network roadmaps. Your
best approach is to try out both to see which
solution or combination of solutions is best
suited to your environment and would yield the
greatest cost savings and increased agility.
Enterprises that embrace virtual networks
and use them to push their overall adoption of
virtualization techniques will see the greatest
return on their investment. To ensure success,
however, IT may need to rethink both its tradi-
tional organizational structure and enterprise
system management tooling capabilities. Orga-
nizations can further protect their virtualiza-
tion investments by embracing open standards
whenever possible. Finally, determine now how
software-dened networks can increase your
agility and reduce deployment challenges and
costs. Henry Svendblad
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1 2 NETWORK MONI TORI NG AND MANAGEMENT
TOM NOLLE is president of CIMI Corporation, a strategic
consulting rm specializing in telecommunications and
data communications since 1982. He is also the publisher
of Netwatcher, a journal addressing advanced telecom-
munications strategy issues.
JOHN BURKE is principal research analyst with Nemertes
Research. With nearly two decades of technology ex-
perience, he has worked at all levels of IT, including
end-user support specialist, programmer, system admin-
istrator, database specialist, network administrator, net-
work architect and systems architect. He has worked at
Johns Hopkins University, the College of St. Catherine
and the University of St. Thomas.
HENRY SVENDBLAD is a principal research analyst with
Nemertes Research, where he conducts both primary
benchmark research and custom research, advises vendor
and enterprise clients, writes thought-leadership reports
and delivers strategic seminars. A seasoned senior-level
IT executive, Henry leads research on advanced carrier
services, with an emphasis on emerging trends, vendor
management, business continuity/disaster recovery,
security and cloud strategies.
ABOUT
THE
AUTHORS
This Technical Guide on
Network Monitoring and Management is a
SearchNetworking.com e-publication.
Kate Gerwig | Editorial Director
Kara Gattine | Senior Managing Editor
Rivka Gewirtz Little | Executive Editor
Shamus McGillicuddy | News Director
Chuck Moozakis | Site Editor
Rachel Shuster | Associate Managing Editor
Linda Koury | Director of Online Design
Neva Maniscalco | Graphic Designer
Doug Olender | Vice President/Group Publisher
[email protected]
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