By Ben Erwin, Product Manager for NetQoS Performance Center 3.0
& Steve Harriman, Vice President of Marketing at NetQoS:
We’ve recently held a Webinar to discuss NetQoS Performance Center 3.0. We had a Q&A session there and we would like to reproduce some of the questions attendees asked about NetQoS Performance Center 3.0, and the answers we provided. We also plan to answer the questions we couldn’t get to during the Webinar on this blog by the end of this week.
(Continued…)
Q: Is there an agent that needs to be installed on the service to monitor CPU and other settings, or is this done via SNMP?
A: This is all done via SNMP. There are no agents required in any component of the NetQoS Performance Center. All the products are collecting information passively, except for device information, which is collected via SNMP.
Q: How often the device touched by SNMP?
A: As often as you want. Based on some of the active investigation capabilities built into the NetQoS Performance Center, that is completely up to your discretion. How often you want to poll this information and how often you want to create these investigations is customized based on your settings.
Q: Is the NetQoS Performance Center 3.0 shipping now?
A: Yes, and if you’re a NetQoS customer, this is a free product that comes with any one of the product modules: SuperAgent, ReporterAnalyzer or NetVoyant.
Q: What functionality do I lose if I only purchase ReporterAnalyzer and NetVoyant – not SuperAgent?
A: SuperAgent is the end-to-end performance monitoring product. It’s the component that will tell you where latency is occurring – whether it’s in the network, the server infrastructure, or if it’s in the application itself. It’s the component that will automatically fire off an investigation to provide you with diagnostic data when service-level thresholds are breached. However, the NetQoS Performance Center will function perfectly well without it.
Q: Are NetQoS Performance Center’s components licensed per seat or per enterprise?
A: The portal itself is a no-charge item with any one of the underlying products, and all three of the products are priced differently and are tied to the size of the infrastructure you’re monitoring.
Q: What are the minimum requirements for NetQoS Performance Center?
A: NetQoS Performance Center 3.0 requires either SuperAgent 7.0 or 7.1, Reporter Analyzer 7.2 and 7.3, and NetVoyant 4.0 and 4.1.
Q: What performance overhead do NetQoS’s products have on the network?
A: The SNMP polling has very little impact on the network or the devices on it.
The traffic analysis component, ReporterAnalyzer, collects Cisco NetFlow from NetFlow enabled routers. That impact on the network is very little, likely along the scale of less of one percent of the bandwidth you have available for this NetFlow traffic. The SuperAgent component collects traffic passively off a span port in the data center, so that does not affect traffic at all.
Q: How many users can run NetQoS Performance Center concurrently?
A: We have some large implementations and in some cases, we often have 150 to 200 users hitting it on a single console. Large scale capacity for large networks is built as part of the architecture behind the NetQoS Performance Center.
Q: What does it use for a database backend?
A: All NetQoS products use MySQL.
Q: What specific vendors are supported?
A: There’s no limit to which vendors are supported by the NetQoS Performance Center 3.0. As long as it’s a Web application, we can export those views into any off-the-shelf or homegrown Web portal, or do inbound data integration through ODBC type mechanisms.
Q: Any specific VoIP analysis tools?
A: Today we offer some VoIP monitoring capabilities in the form of IPSLA support for monitoring voice quality between two routers through active IPSLA testing. We can tell you what the VoIP traffic composition is on the network, with ReporterAnalyzer, our NetFlow reporting tool, and we can monitor call setup time with SuperAgent, assuming that call setup is conducted using the TCP protocol. Some of you may have heard – though this is not yet announced – that we are releasing a VoIP monitoring product later this year. It will be integrated with the NetQoS Performance Center, but announcements about the product will not be made until late in the 2nd Quarter 2007.
Q: What are the OS requirements for the server?
A: The servers we supply are all sold as appliances, and they all run Windows 2003.
Q: Does this program support Firefox?
A: Yes.
Q: Are there any limitations using non-Cisco equipment, such as a Nortel LAN?
A: There aren’t many limitations using the Nortel LAN. There are now some Nortel switches that support the IPFIX protocol, which is a NetFlow protocol for supplying the traffic analysis information into the NetQoS Performance Center. If your Nortel switches have a mirroring or spanning capability from them, you can use the end-to-end response time component to measure the delivery of the applications to your users.
Q: Can one instance be used worldwide?
A: Yes – we have several customers today that have regional groups that are using the NetQoS Performance Center. Everything is based on time zones, so users around the world can use the NetQoS Performance Center and see the information shifted based on the time zone from which they’re looking at it.
Q: Does it report device and port availability by given period?
A: Yes, you can report on port availability for whatever period you’re interested in, whether that’s hourly, daily, weekly – whatever’s important for whatever you need to plan around.
Q: How does an existing customer with NetQoS Performance Center 2.2 get NetQoS Performance Center 3.0?
A: Talk with your account manager. NetQoS Performance Center 3.0 is free to NetQoS customers, and there should be no reason why you wouldn’t be able to get it.
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