Network Performance Management: Keep up the newday-everyday promise.

Industry reports say that 60% of employees in large enterprises work from branch offices. They do so by accessing critical applications and services via their corporate WAN for vital business functions such as sales, finance, customer support etc., on a day-to-day basis. Their lives are so dependent on the WAN that any minor reduction in quality will lead to huge losses in productivity, and increase customer dissatisfaction.

Challenges of managing a WAN

The performance of a network is dependent on many components including few which are beyond the control of an organization such as the ISP's quality of service. You can't measure it and you can't take it for granted either. (Ever heard an ISP saying "sorry we found that our quality was below the agreed levels for the months 3 & 5 and hence we would like to refund you" without you asking for it?). Moreover, with the increased collaboration, network pipes are now carrying voice and video which need higher QOS, the lack of which defeats the purpose.

Some of the common problems in delivering a high performance network are:

• Continuously visualize the expanding and complex network infrastructure and the service provider portion of the network
• Analyze terrabytes of data and convert them into meaningful trend charts for capacity planning
• Analyze the perennial and humongous log files and find out attacks, security threats before they impact the network
• Centralized monitoring of availability and health of a heterogeneous network infrastructure from disparate locations
• Backup configurations of every network device for ensuring business continuity

ManageEngine Network Performance Management Suite

If you are a network manager, you need pro-active network performance management tools such as the ManageEngine Network Performance Mgmt Suite, that helps you do the following

• Visualize the entire WAN as one single dynamic map

The web based map maker tool enables you to drag and drop routers and build a network map in a snap!



• Identify potential performance bottlenecks first hand

Setting up thresholds based alerting on key parameters can foretell failures.

Router	Switch	Firewall
1. Router Memory Utilization 2. Small Buffer Hits 3. Small Buffer Misses 4. Big Buffer Hits 5. Big Buffer Misses 6. Medium Buffer Hits 7. Medium Buffer Misses 8. Buffer Create Failures 9. Buffer Failures 10. Total Huge Buffer Hits 11. Total Huge Buffer Misses 12. Total Large Buffer Hits 13. Total Large Buffer Misses 14. Total No. of Collisions 15. Aborted Interface In Packets 16. Ignored Interface In Packets 17. Input Packet Drops 18. Interface Collisions 19. Interface In CRC Errors 20. Interface In Giants 21. Interface In Runts 22. Interface Input Bits 23. Interface Output Bits 24. Interface Reset Count 25. Interface Restart Count 26. Largest Free Memory	1. Switch CPU Utilization(5 mins avg) 2. Switch Memory Utilization 3. Backplane Utilization 4. Jabber Packets common for router / switch 1. CPU Usage (1 min avg) 2. CPU Usage (5 mins avg) 3. CPU Usage (5 secs avg)	1. Active Session Count 2. Firewall CPU Utilization 3. Free 1550K Buffers 4. Free 256K Buffers 5. Free 4K Buffers 6. Free 80K Buffers 7. Free Memory Not yet analyzed 1. Cisco Memory Utilization 2. Drop Events Statistics 3. Number of Fragments 4. Output Packet Drops 5. Oversize Packets 6. Packets Received 7. Packets to BC Address 8. Packets to MC Address 9. Temperature 10. Total No. of Octets 11. Undersize Packets 12. Used Memory

• Get insights from the syslog

Sylogs provide an excellent way to learn more about device performance and failures. ManageEngine offers a clean way to get Syslog messages from multiple systems, correlate them, and provide unique data points that help in root cause analysis.



• Troubleshoot slow links

IPSLA based monitoring enables you to see the hop-by-hop performance



• Drill down right from a link to the different applications, protocols used and right down to the user who generates traffic. (Got You!)

Using NetFlow you can drill down a bad link right down to the user level.



• Ensure business continuity by backing up router and switch configurations.

Losing sleep and resources to prevent accidental changes to device configurations? With ManageEngine you can automate backup processes across switches, routers, and firewalls. Rest assured! After all, if a network device does fail, you can restore it to the last known best configuration in seconds. And get reports on configuration differences and changes as well.

Sample Scenario

Supplemental Healthcare Inc., offers healthcare staffing solutions in 30 different states all over US. Incorporated in 1984 and headquartered in Park City, UT Supplemental healthcare today offers online university for healthcare education and is one of the top 10 healthcare staffing organizations in the nation. At the helm of Supplemental's network is Gordon and his team who work on the "new day-everyday" promise.

More than 500 employees accessing email and other corporate data from the headquarters cutting across 50 different kinds of routers, 40 different firewalls, more than 40 switches, and multiple T1s and T3s. Sounds simple... But imagine a user system getting infected and spiking traffic all over the WAN, or a router memory error causing a bandwidth bottleneck.All these invariably affect the end user productivity. Emails would take forever for a simple fetch... A search request on the corporate CRM could return a blank page... VoIP phones could have degraded voice quality....

A network catastrophe! Gordon however is safe from these nightmares with ManageEngine Network Performance tools....

Related Products

• Device Expert
• NetFlow Analyzer
• OpManager
• OpUtils
• VoIP QoS Monitor
• WiFi Manager

Articles

• WAN Performance Solution Brief
• Branch Office Black Out
• CIO's Handguide
• IPSLA Based Indepth WAN monitoring
• Multi-location monitoring using remote pollers