Author Profile - Helen Tang is the VP of Marketing for ExtraHop Networks, spearheading all marketing and go-to-market efforts. Helen comes to ExtraHop with over ten years of experience with an illustrious lineup of systems-management heavyweights that include HP, Opsware, iConclude, Mercury, and CA Wily. Most recently, she served as Director of Strategic Marketing for the BTO division within HP Software. Helen is passionate about messaging, customer success, and geeking out through osmosis.
ExtraHop Networks was founded in early 2007 by Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, engineering veterans from F5 Networks and architects of the BIG-IP v9 product. The company’s pioneering Application Delivery Assurance system is the industry’s first completely passive network appliance that provides application-level visibility with zero agents, configuration, or overhead. The privately held company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington and funded by Madrona Venture Group and other private investors.
Network Troubleshooting in half the time?
Just think of what you can do with the extra TIME!!!!
I think it’s a known fact that Network engineers spend too much of their time troubleshooting, tracking down persnickety problems, many of which aren’t even network-related. I’ve read analyst reports that cite stats like the average network engineer spends “up to 70%” of their time troubleshooting application performance issues. Not sure if the number is really that high, but I think we’ll all agree that it’s considerable.
So wouldn’t you like it if you can half that time?
That’s exactly what the IT guys at NSRI wanted. NSRI is the internal IT arm for a large global shipping company. The work they do on a day-to-day basis helps to keep the fleet afloat – literally. This small team of IT gurus keep hundreds of applications humming along, so the “mother ship” can do things like vessel scheduling, container booking, bill of lading document processing etc, all mission-critical to be sure.
Now like most IT organization these days, the NSRI team manages a complex environment, multiple OS’s, databases, virtual environments, and many applications built on top of different technology platforms. In this kind of a fast-moving environment, things will break and the subsequent support and troubleshooting work becomes quite challenging. Experts across multiple teams are frequently pulled into long sessions to jointly diagnose intermittent issues that extend across different platforms and teams. Is it the network? Is it the storage device? The application itself? These same questions were ever-present, until they deployed the latest solution available today - ExtraHop.
NSRI uses ExtraHop to provide integrated visibility for everything in the application environment. One product, one UI that can show everything from the application, to the network, to storage devices and databases. The install was a cinch, clocking in at just over 15 minutes from rack mount, connecting up 2 interfaces via network access point (Best if TAP, but SPAN is also viable), acquire an IP address, you are up and running!
The ExtraHop system starts auto-discovery, monitoring all apps, devices and transactions (tens of thousands of them, all in real time). The system sends out proactive alerts on potential problems, so network engineers don’t have to sift through mountains of offline packet dumps.
When issues arise, or just to see what is going on inside the network, the NSRI team logs into ExtraHop to get an overall picture of the network and then can drill down to more detailed metrics to find the root cause of any issue. The ease of use and the depth of view dramatically reduces the troubleshooting time for all teams involved, and helps improve the performance and availability of these mission-critical systems and applications. In addition, ExtraHop provides tuning advice for some of these infrastructure devices through context-sensitive help. In one tuning session, The NSRI Team saw very visible results like:
- 84% reduction in the packet timeouts for outbound data
- 58% reduction in the packet timeouts for inbound data
- 70% reduction in total dropped network packets
- 10% reduction in CPU load and fewer spikes
- On average, 50 fewer processes running on the DB server
Here’s the leader of this fearless team, Kurt Shubert – Application Support Manager, NSRI, talking about his ExtraHop experience: “The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is used extensively at NSRI for increased visibility and faster troubleshooting. We have seen outstanding results. ExtraHop has helped us bridge the communication between the application support and network teams, resulting in reduced MTTR, lower operational costs and improved customer satisfaction.”
A Thank You to the NSRI team, and a shout-out to all network engineering teams out there, let’s work together to find ways to cut that troubleshooting time in half!
So if you are interested in cutting your troubleshooting time in half and getting deeper visibility into your network, better check out the ExtraHop solution.
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