Interested in True Network Performance? Measure it From an Application Perspective.

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Interested in True Network

Performance? Measure it From

an Application Perspective.

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The Singular Importance of Application

Performance

To ensure that their applications can deliver the level of service customers expect, many of these organizations have invested in application performance management (APM) and/or network performance management (NPM) products that provide visibility into applications themselves and the performance of network devices and long-distance links, respectively.

The problem with this approach, however, is that APM and NPM operations are often built up in silos — meaning little integration

or communication occurs between the teams monitoring them, save for when performance degradations occur, and then the blame game begins.

In today’s landscape where application performance is everything, it’s clear that a new approach is needed — one that assesses network and application performance both in context with each other and in how they impact the business.

More than ever before, applications are becoming the lifeblood for most organizations. Consider online

retailers, insurance providers, banks or any company that delivers a service over the cloud. Their entire brand

identity is wrapped up in the performance of their applications, which means that any service delays or

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The Need for Application-driven Network

Performance Management (ANPM)

What does this mean? Organizations must begin transitioning from siloed APM and NPM operations to an application-driven network performance management (ANPM) perspective that puts the health and operation of the network in context with the services being delivered to end users.

With the right ANPM solution, the network group becomes more intricately tied to overall organizational success, as opposed to just “keeping the lights on” or being the first point of blame when performance issues occur. And because ANPM represents a new way of thinking about performance management, it’s important to examine how it can positively impact specific use cases within the enterprise.

Network managers can no longer be concerned with just interoperability and uptime. They need to recognize

and eliminate application performance issues in real time or before they even occur — a method that requires

a direct understanding of how applications and services are performing over the network they are sharing.

With ANPM, network professionals can shift

their focus from “keeping the lights on” to

directly supporting organizational goals.

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Four Areas Where ANPM Can Improve

Network Management

The recent focus on application performance demands a more proactive approach to identifying and addressing potential network performance degradations. With the right ANPM solution, organizations can transition to such a proactive approach in four key areas:

Optimizing

the WAN

Providing High-

quality Unified

Communications

Troubleshooting

Performance

Problems

Capacity

Planning

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Troubleshooting Performance

Problems

As most network professionals are quick to admit, troubleshooting performance problems

represents a significant portion of their day-to-day duties. By connecting network

performance to application performance, an ANPM solution can help them avoid time

wasted on back-and-forth finger pointing and expedite problem resolution.

Without ANPM:

— Primary focus is on deflecting blame and/or keeping the network “up,” versus optimization and innovation

— Performance issues are detected and resolved in a manual, reactive way, requiring additional IT time and costs

— Quality of Service (QoS) policies are not optimized to reflect the evolving demands placed on the network

— WAN visibility shows overall bandwidth usage, but not what applications are running on the network or which of those applications and hosts are consuming the most bandwidth — slowing triage and resolution times

With ANPM:

— Primary focus is on the end-user experience and how users’ expectations can be met

— Anomalous activities are automatically detected and actions are assigned based on impact to application performance and end-user experience — QoS policies evolve as application needs grow

and change over time

— WAN visibility includes knowing where problems are occurring, who is consuming bandwidth and what is threatening performance

Troubleshooting Performance Problems Capacity Planning Optimizing the WAN Providing High-quality Unified Communications

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Capacity Planning

It’s no secret that networks — and the operations they support — grow and change over

time. Whether in response to mergers and acquisitions, the launch of a new product,

technology or service or another major initiative, organizations can leverage usage and

activity data pulled from an ANPM solution to justify network capacity needs and

effectively plan for the future.

Without ANPM:

— Capacity planning is an educated guessing game

— Additional bandwidth is thrown at problem areas, sometimes resulting in overprovisioned assets that can be costly

— Infrastructure investments are made

reactively on an individual, as-needed basis, making it difficult to scale in an agile and effective way

With ANPM:

— Capacity planning is based on historical, trend and benchmark data pulled from the network — Bandwidth is intelligently distributed based on

traffic patterns, critical application requirements and QoS policies

— Infrastructure investments are made holistically with consideration for application rollouts, potential bottlenecks and future capacity needs

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Optimizing the WAN

As a companion use case to capacity planning, WAN optimization is all about maximizing

existing investments and increasing the cost efficiency of the network infrastructure. The

right ANPM solution will enable network professionals to access important network data,

including traffic flow information, and perform advanced analytics in order to determine

the most productive and effective distribution of network resources.

Without ANPM:

— New investment and/or upgrade decisions are made before existing resources have been adequately tested and reconfigured — Limited visibility into usage patterns leads

to inefficient workload scheduling and QoS policies

— Additional costs are accrued through unnecessary investments and staff implementation/management time

With ANPM:

— Long-term, historical data can be used to

maximize existing resources and delay or prevent additional investments/upgrades

— Holistic visibility helps drive effective workload scheduling and QoS policies, optimizing the network for application performance

— Additional costs are avoided through optimum utilization of resources and network

professionals’ time Troubleshooting Performance Problems Capacity Planning Optimizing the WAN Providing High-quality Unified Communications

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Ensuring Unified Communications

(UC) Performance

As unified communications (UC) technologies that run over an organization’s IP network

have grown in popularity, the services they power (e.g., voice over IP (VoIP), video and

teleconferencing, etc.) have occupied increasingly large swaths of network bandwidth.

The right ANPM solution will empower network professionals to proactively protect and

assure the availability and performance of UC applications, rapidly troubleshoot and

restore services when issues arise and ensure that UC applications and critical data

applications are allocated the type of service each requires.

Without ANPM:

— Heavy, unpredictable bandwidth demands cause performance degradations in UC and other applications

— QoS policies may not support the unique service qualities required by VoIP and video — Limited data-collection and analysis

capabilities prevent network professionals from assessing UC performance in the context of how it affects other critical applications

With ANPM:

— Effective monitoring of voice and video quality metrics helps ensure a high-performance UC experience

— Visibility into voice and video performance metrics in context with metrics for other critical applications ensures that QoS policies are meeting the needs of all application types — Visibility into activity across the infrastructure

enables IT staff to quickly identify where incidents are occurring, what is the cause and what users and applications are impacted

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The common element in how ANPM affects each of the aforementioned use cases is a switch from

reactive, break/fix, trial-and-error network management to a more proactive approach that leverages

historical and real-time data to maximize network resource utilization and support the organization’s

most critical applications.

Additionally, ANPM can help organizations achieve the following business benefits:

Assessing the Benefits of ANPM

Accelerated troubleshooting

helps

improve application performance and the end-user experience, while also increasing network professionals’ productivity

Enhanced capacity planning

helps

the business anticipate changing traffic demands and scale cost-effectively to meet future requirements

Increased UC performance

helps

improve collaboration among users, increase their productivity and support efficient operations

Improved WAN optimization

helps

maximize the use of existing assets, while clearly identifying where and when new assets are needed

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About the Solution from

CA Technologies

The Application-driven Network Performance Management (ANPM) solution from CA Technologies results from the fusion of three leading infrastructure management products: CA Network Flow Analysis, CA Application Delivery Analysis and CA Unified Communications Monitor.

CA Network Flow Analysis

provides real-time visibility and historical analysis of which applications, protocols and hosts are consuming the most network bandwidth, enabling informed decisions for optimizing and improving network service delivery, capacity planning and cost reduction.

CA Application Delivery Analysis

provides end-to-end application response time monitoring to help you manage application performance, prove the

performance of applications delivered over the network, validate the impact of change and solve problems faster.

CA Unified Communications Monitor

is uniquely capable of linking UC quality of experience through VoIP and video monitoring and reporting with additional data collection and analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of how the converged network is supporting real-time applications.

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CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments — from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies’ innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems.