The Aberdeen Group, a provider of business research services surveyed 205 organizations last month to identify best practices for enterprise network visibility initiatives and controls. They called the report “The Real Value of Network Visibility.”
In the interests of full disclosure, it should be said that NetQoS co-sponsored the study but we did so only after the survey was conducted and the analysis complete. That said, though, the study pretty much validates our entire “performance first” approach towards network and application performance management.
What the Aberdeen Group suggests is a PACE model (Pressures, Actions, Capabilities, and Enablers) to achieve corporate goals. The idea is that businesses are pressured to be responsible to customer needs, and the actions that are effective are to establish a proactive control of the network. In order to do this, you need to be capable of defining your escalation pathways for network performance issues, having normal networking performance baselines, understand interdependencies between applications on the network, be able to segment round-trip application response times into delays caused by the server, the network, and the application, and finally, have a centralized point for looking at the network performance data.
Frequent readers of this blog will no doubt notice that this is the point where I usually mention that NetQoS makes some of the products which enable those capabilities. The Aberdeen Group reports that these “enablers” are network performance monitoring through a Web interface, tools for remote analysis and troubleshooting of network performance, tools for creating custom profiles for monitoring groups of network hardware, a unified network performance and security platform, tools for Netflow data analysis, and a lab environment to simulate network performance.
There are some other gems in there to be found. The survey results showed that that top 20% of performance scorers:
- Were the most likely to have the capabilities and enablers mentioned under the PACE model.
- Were spending less time on troubleshooting network performance and application performance, managing changes to network design, or enforcing network usage policies.
- Were much more likely to have merged application and network management into a single job role, and more likely to merge the application, network, and systems management teams into a single organizational unit.
- Were able to fix problems faster and less likely to rely on calls to the help desk for determining network problems.
What do you think about the Aberdeen Group’s report? Feel free to leave a comment below.
No comments yet.