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Troubleshooting Hogs Bandwidth (by Steve Brown)

Vendor Profile - Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.

Stephen Brown is the Product Marketing Manager for Network Instruments with nearly a decade of experience in network management and security. Steve is also the head geek in charge of their company blog, Network Observations. Steve likes to "get his geek on" anything network security related, VoIP stuff, and anything music and biking related (the kind that requires push power).

Between January and February 2008, we have communicated with 592 network engineers, IT directors, and CIOs scattered around North America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America. In addition to being geographically diverse, the population was also evenly distributed among different sized networks. This study was a follow-up of a similar exercise we performed a year ago and the goal is to gauge the changing attitudes and concerns of network professionals, to calculate the average time spent by an IT staff troubleshooting network problems, and to determine adoption rates of new technologies and topologies.

As a leading provider of innovative network analysis solutions, helping organizations and enterprises – including 70 of the Global Fortune 100 companies, it is obvious why Network Instruments would want to know what networking experts think. But we have learned that most of all, technologists also want to hear from other technologists. As Mike Barlow, coauthor of the book “Partnering With the CIO”, has said, “[CIOs] want to listen to other CIOs, not the VP of marketing … they want to hear from someone who's had the same experiences they have.”

What we have learned from this global survey is that despite the many new tools for monitoring and optimizing application performance, almost 75 percent of network professionals continue to cite “identifying the source of a problem” as their primary troubleshooting concern, marking a 25 percent increase from 2007. Performance problems are also on the rise with over two-thirds of respondents spending at least 25 days per year determining the cause of these issues.

Our research indicates that network professionals faced the following challenges:

• Continued lack of troubleshooting information: 31 percent cited this as their major network concern
  
• Ensuring application delivery: 25 percent felt this was the greatest network challenge
  
• Application performance headaches: Over one-third cited bandwidth consumption issues as the chief offender, while 32 percent selected application latency and delay issues as the second most common
  
• Problems investigating intermittent errors: 32 percent felt their organization needed to improve its ability to troubleshoot sporadic performance errors
  
• Security and compliance problems: These issues continue to be a headache for three-quarters of respondents
  

Fallon Clinic on Network Instruments

"I have been able to cut troubleshooting down from about five hours ... to merely minutes."

-- Hamid Ali, Network Engineer, Fallon Clinic

Customer Profile - Founded in 1929 by Dr. John Fallon and a team of local physicians, Fallon Clinic was central Massachusetts’ first group practice. As one of the most dynamic and progressive health care organizations in the country today, Fallon Clinic continues to achieve some of the highest quality of care ratings in the country. They are leaders in health care delivery innovation, transforming patient care paradigms, and establishing a new “gold standard” in patient care service. With more than 250 physicians practicing in nearly 30 locations, Fallon Clinic provides comprehensive care for more than one million patient visits a year, and is the largest private, multi-specialty group in central Massachusetts.

Vendor Profile - Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.

Challenge

Fallon Clinic’s quality of service has close ties to its network health. If the network fails or slows down, customer service suffers. Patients don’t like to wait, so it’s important for Network Engineer Hamid Ali to stay on top of his network.

Fallon Clinic has more than 250 physicians across nearly 30 locations throughout Massachusetts. A total of 2,500 users depend on the network, which has its backbone at the West Boylston site. The core communicates with remote offices via point-to-point WAN links, and local networks are built using Fast Ethernet switches. Although the current network is exclusively wired, Fallon plans to implement wireless soon.

Ali previously used Network General’s Sniffer to monitor the local network. However, as the company grew, he needed greater WAN visibility. Purchasing another costly product from Network General to manage the WAN wasn’t an option. Even if he made the purchase, Sniffer wouldn’t provide the flexibility to analyze both the WAN and LAN simultaneously, from one console. This would mean having to choose whether to focus on the WAN or the LAN, and yet again having problems go undetected and undiagnosed until users complained.

FBL Finance Group on Compuware

"With the Vantage suite, we saw value right away, right out of the box."

-- Matt Evanson, Enterprise Monitoring Solutions Team Leader, FBL Financial Group, Inc.

Customer Profile - FBL Financial Group, headquartered in West Des Moines, Iowa, is a holding company whose primary operating subsidiaries are Farm Bureau Life Insurance Company and EquiTrust Life Insurance Company. FBL currently underwrites, markets and distributes life insurance, annuities and mutual funds to individuals and small businesses. In addition, FBL manages all aspects of three Farm Bureau affiliated property-casualty insurance companies for a management fee. FBL Financial Group, Inc. is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FFG.

Vendor Profile - Compuware Corporation maximizes the value IT brings to the business by helping CIOs more effectively manage the business of IT. Compuware solutions accelerate the development, improve the quality and enhance the performance of critical business systems while enabling CIOs to align and govern the entire IT portfolio, increasing efficiency, cost control and employee productivity throughout the IT organization. Founded in 1973, Compuware serves the world's leading IT organizations, including more than 90 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. Compuware's 2006 sales was $1.2 billion.

Customer: Matthew Evanson & Ken Shaffer, Farm Bureau Financial Services

Situation: Measure application performance for better decision-making.

In Brief:

End users of FBL’s Personal Package Policy (P3) application were experiencing multiple performance problems. The decision was made to try a well-known product suite in an effort to alleviate the issues, but the implementation was plagued by a lack of both performance improvement and return on investment. The company was also relying on help desk calls to alert them to performance slowdowns. By implementing the Compuware Vantage suite of tools, FBL was able to get ahead of the curve and become more proactive about providing optimal application service to end users. Implementation was easy and value was quickly realized--and Vantage tools have since been put into use in a number of different areas of the company’s IT organization.

By implementing the Compuware Vantage suite of tools, FBL was able to get ahead of the curve and become more proactive about providing optimal application service to end users. Implementation was easy and value was quickly realized—and Vantage tools have since been put into use in a number of different areas of the company’s IT organization.

Go Deep or Get No Sleep (by Tim O’Neill)

Editor Profile - Tim O’Neill is an independent technology consultant. He has over 30 years experience working in the WAN, Analog, ISDN, ATM and LAN test market. Tim has worked with companies like Navtel, Network General, Ganymede and ClearSight Networks and is now helping companies get lab recognition and technology verification. Tim is also the Chief Contributing Editor for LoveMyTool.com, a website designed to help network managers gain access to valuable information and real solution stories from other customers. Tim is a patent holding, published and degreed engineer, who has seen this technology grow from Teletype (current loop) data analysis to today’s 10 Gigabit LAN’s focused on business applications with heavy compliance demands. Tim can be reached at oldcommguy (at) bellsouth (dot) net.

One-Minute Videos courtsey of ConvergeDigest.com

Are you interested in Deep Packet Capture and Inspection, as every Network Manger should?

Then I have a site for you to visit to get and share great information, dPacket.org!

I recently had the pleasure and opportunity to meet with Kyle Rosenthal who is the co-Founder of a unique and very important information site, dPacket.org. This site was created to focus on the technologies and products related to Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) as well as Deep Packet Capture (DPC), both of which are very important for successful network management in today’s security and compliance intensive markets.

dPacket.org brings together many important resources to help in the thorough understanding of these demanding technologies as well as a blog/community for deeper exchange of information, ideas, success stories and much more.

The following review is a quick tutorial of DPI/DPC as well as an introduction into the valuable resources that dPacket.org provides which will help you increase your knowledge in this leading edge technology that is and will be a major part of the network future, your network future! Great reading….

Tom Bowers on Reconnex

“We evaluated all the major vendors and Reconnex. Reconnex provides everything we need for content protection at a much better value point, compared to Vontu. Tablus did not meet our requirements, and Vericept does not provide forensic analysis ... Our job is content protection. There are 5000 clinical investigators globally. We need to monitor them because our research information is out there. There are also major outsourcing deals that need monitoring. If competitors gain access to any of this information, the cost to the company would be enormous. We want to know who’s giving data to whom. That’s where Reconnex comes in.”

-- Tom Bowers, Manager of Information Security Operations for a Fortune 100 Pharmaceutical Company


Customer Profile - Tom Bowers was previously the Manager of Information Security Operations for a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company, where he directed information protection teams across the globe, including employee training, incident response and investigation of intellectual property loss.

Bowers is currently the Managing Director of Security Constructs, LLC and Technical Editor of Information Security magazine and SearchSecurity.com

Bowers holds the CISSP, PMP and Certified Ethical Hacker certifications, is a well known expert on the topics of data leakage prevention, global enterprise information security architecture and ethical hacking. He is also the president of the Philadelphia chapter of InfraGard, the second largest chapter in the country with more than 600 members. Additionally, Bowers leads the independent think tank and industry analyst group Security Constructs, LLC. His areas of expertise include aligning business needs with security architecture, risk assessment and project management on a global scale. He brings a real world, pragmatic approach to the business of security based upon his Fortune 100 enterprise experience in both the IT and Global Security functions.

Bowers has worked in the computer field since the early 1980s and uses his years of experience in penetration testing, security project management, security product evaluation and implementation, and computer forensics for clients on a consulting basis throughout the U.S. His most recent contributions to Information Security magazine include a cost-benefit analysis of various strong authentication mechanisms and numerous product reviews. He is the author of several white papers, articles and is a highly respected speaker at conferences and webinars.

Vendor Profile - Reconnex is the leader in information monitoring and protection appliances designed for any organization – including enterprises, government agencies or educational institutions – that wants to protect its brand, maintain compliance, or secure sensitive information. Reconnex’s simple-to-deploy appliance delivers accurate detection while protecting an enterprise before, during, and after any threat to corporate privacy or intellectual property. A privately held company based in Silicon Valley, Calif., Reconnex protects information for over one million users today.





Challenges

• Track information throughout the network
• Maintain control of information outside the network
• Prevent information from being compromised or leaked to outsiders

Solution

• Reconnex iGuard purpose-built appliance for information monitoring and protection

Benefits

• Protect intellectual property
• Enforce policies and enable comprehensive IT security
• Improve efficiency of security staff and provide peace of mind

Network Analysis, Going Retro (by William McClain)

Vendor Profile - Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.

William McClain is the Marketing Communications Specialist for Network Instruments.

Summary

While network complexity and bandwidth demands continue to increase, applications such as VoIP increase performance requirements. Now more than ever, network administrators require versatile monitoring and analysis tools to quickly troubleshoot business-critical operations and monitor security and compliance. In this environment, Retrospective Network Analysis (RNA) tools that let you go “back in time” to reconstruct a failure or attack can offer distinct advantages over analysis tools that only operate in real time.

Intercontinental Hotels Group on OPNET

“ACE is easy enough to use that even a novice can leverage it to identify problems that would ordinarily require considerable expertise to uncover. Because of ACE every member of my team can make valuable contributions with half the effort.”

-- Gary Abbott, Network Capacity Planner, Intercontinental Hotels Group

Customer Profile - With over 3,600 hotels in nearly 100 countries, Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) serves more than 120 million guests a year at their Intercontinental Hotels, and other hospitality brands such as Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and Candlewood Suites. The hotels are administered centrally from Atlanta, GA. IHG use OPNET regularly as part of an extensive application certification process, as well as for capacity planning and troubleshooting requirements.

Vendor Profile - OPNET Technologies, Inc. offers management software for networks and applications in the United States, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Among others, The company's products include ACE that enables application performance management through advanced analytics. The company serves corporate enterprises, government and defense agencies, network service providers, and network equipment manufacturers through direct sales force, subsidiaries, distributors, original equipment manufacturers, and resellers. OPNET Technologies was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland.

IHG Optimizes Its Invoice Processing Application with OPNET’s ACE

Before relocating their local invoice processing center to India, IHG profiled a key application with OPNET’s ACE module.

Gary Abbott, Network Capacity Planner, identified three critical questions:

• What impact would sending scanned invoices halfway around the world have on the WAN? Would a network upgrade be required to support the relocation?

• Would transaction response be affected, such that additional staff would be needed to sustain transaction volume?

• How well would the Citrix-based invoice processing application be supported?

Team Building versus Bread Making (by Denny K Miu)

Editor Profile - Denny K Miu is the Founder and former CEO of two companies, Gigamon Systems and Integrated Micromachines (now Touchdown Technologies). Denny has extensive experience in developing technology, products and business relationships. He has been a Professor, an engineer, an entrepreneur, a team leader as well as an individual contributor.

Denny is currently the Executive Editor of LoveMyTool.com, his third start-up. He can be reached at denny (dot) miu (at) gmail (dot) com.

It takes a lot to build a successful startup. You need to start with a good product idea. And if it turns out that your initial (or even subsequent) idea sucks, which is often the case, then hopefully you possess the tenacity and the credibility to continue to evolve your business such that you eventually come upon a good product idea. Then you need to build a good team. Finally you need good execution and good timing.

And that’s pretty much the order. In other words, if you start with a bad idea, then even a top-notch team can’t help you push a square peg through a round hole (without hurting something or someone). And if you have a great idea and a great team but bad execution, then good timing simply makes it more obvious that you have completely squandered your early-mover advantage (while wasting a lot of blood and treasure along the way).

Of all the elements that are important to the success of a startup, the most important human element is the CEO. A good CEO does not guarantee success of a startup but a bad one will undoubtedly contribute to its failure.

Most bootstrapping entrepreneurs (like myself) take the title of Founder/CEO.

A Founder is a shareholder of the company, pure and simple. However, one can be a Founder (especially a co-Founder) without being the CEO. Or one can be a CEO without being the Founder (which is theoretically possible but unlikely for a bootstrapping startup except at a later stage).

It is easy enough to figure out what it takes to be a good Founder, but what does it take to be a good CEO? Or more preciously, what does it take to be a good Founder/CEO?

Unfortunately I know a lot more about what it takes to be a bad Founder/CEO than what it takes to be a good Founder/CEO (which doesn’t stop me from writing as if I am the expert, for the same reason that not knowing how to build a successful startup never stops me from building them in the first place).

What’s Luck got to do with it? (by Scott Turkow)

Author Profile - Scott Turkow has 8 years of experience in the Enterprise Software space, primarily in Operations and Sales Ops roles. Scott is the Senior Operations Manager at Integrien Corporation, the leading intelligent systems management company that enables the predictable operation of mission critical applications. Prior to Integrien, Scott was with the Resource Management Software Group of EMC, which focused on the development and sale of automated network management products. A tri-athlete in training, Scott tries to be outdoors when he’s unshackled from his computer.

Q: What’s Luck got to do with it?

A: For some, everything.

You’ve got a firewall, a disaster recovery plan, redundant hardware, change management, and trouble ticketing. And then there’s monitoring. Monitors for your network and app performance data – check. Monitors for your O/S and Server data – check. Monitors for Database metrics – check. Storage device metrics – check. Transaction response metrics – collected. In duplicate!

Your 1985-2007 IT Strategy was recently revamped from “If we collect more we’ll have a better chance of detecting problems” to a superior 2008 Strategy “If we collect more and collect it more often, no problem can sneak by us.”

You’ve done it; you’re the master of your IT cosmos! You can proudly don your “Best IT Manager Ever” t-shirt to the office on Monday. Truth is, you were going to wear it anyway, but better to wear it like you mean it. All is good in your world, when suddenly a system slowdown elevates to an outage in a matter of minutes and thousands of users are dead in the water. Feeling like an actor in a Southwest “Want to Get Away” commercial, you begin to ask yourself – what went wrong? With St. Patrick fresh in your mind (and Guinness not so fresh on your breath) you realize your luck simply ran out. Or for those of you who don’t believe in luck – your poor reasoning and wishful thinking caught up with you.

Measuring for Business Impact – The “Level 4 Measurement” (by Tom Tosh)

Editor’s Note - Again, I am very pleased to introduce to our readers, my friend and a very trusted technologist Tom Tosh. ToTom has agreed to write a series of articles about his unique analytical approach to helping clients get more value from their network management tools. The concepts and techniques have been honed from his many years of hands-on experience in helping find the problems that have plagued and solutions that were needed by many network managers and companies that he has helped. His company, Chi-Metrix (pronounced: “key metrics”) and his efforts are all based on these “Metrics” that he will be sharing with you in these articles.

I hope you enjoy reading this series as I have and I wish everyone Great Success … Oldcommguy.

Part 1: Tools, Process and Metrics for Network Managers
Part 2: Measuring for Business Impact – The “Level 4 Measurement”

Measuring for Business Impact – The “Level 4 Measurement” (by Tom Tosh)

In this series of articles, my goal is to broaden the focus on tools beyond just features and prospective benefits alone, to consider the environment and processes in which tools are used to provide genuine, meaningful results. I would like to share and advance to readers, some concepts on how to better evaluate and get more out of the tools and services you may have invested in, or may be considering.

If you can’t measure, you can’t really manage. A site dedicated to tools should ultimately be keenly interested in the overall effectiveness and the success of the network manager. (And how do we propose to measure that?) Our very approach to measuring things should also be subject to scrutiny and assessment, since nothing can lead to greater waste of effort and resources than measuring the wrong things, or measuring the right things in the wrong way. We are all familiar of “GIGO”. Garbage in, Garbage out, so we want to make sure what answers we seek and data acquire are valuable sources of information.

If we are going to get the most out of the investments made to managing a network, I believe we have to begin by looking at our own approach to measuring things and consider how that approach aligns to four tightly-linked dimensions, or levels. Of equal importance is the ability to evaluate the assessments that others present to us.

The Four Dimensions or “How to Love a Tool”

The systematic approach that the IBM Corporation has used to design and develop training, in order to have a positive impact on business results, gave me my first exposure to the concept of four levels of measurement. The approach has proven very helpful to me and my clients for over twenty years, and I hereby acknowledge my debt.