Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ...

As part of the Resource section, the FAQ provides answers to frequently asked questions. Contact NEXVU for more information.

FAQ

Application performance management and network monitoring is a complex endeavor. Find answers to common questions below.

Performance Management

1. What is the biggest challenge in distributed network and application management?

Visibility. All too often, the first indication that a technical problem exists is when a user at a remote site calls the help desk for support. At that point, the impact to the business has already occurred.

IT organizations must employ operational tools that allow them to proactively monitor the remote site and identify potential problems before they impact service to the end-user. This requires deeper insight than just up/down status of networks and devices. Organizations must assess the performance and responsiveness of the applications.

2. What should enterprise software and architects know about application performance management?

Applications must be architected and designed for maximum performance and usability and uniquely tuned for the targeted environment. In essence, developers need to look beyond the mere technical and think it through from the user's perspective.

This starts with understanding the technology environment that the application will be deployed in and ensuring that it is designed to operate within that environment as effectively and efficiently as possible. For example, highly distributed environments with multiple low speed WAN links, often found in banking, retail and insurance organizations, require a different application deployment strategy than consolidated, high speed environments do.

Application architects should consider areas such as session management, transaction profile and communications thread usage as critical areas in the application design process. These areas can all have significant impact on an application's performance and each should be tuned for the specific environment.

The other aspect is the business environment. Will there be peak periods, or will traffic on the application be steady? For example, bank branches are likely to have peak periods before business hours, at lunchtime, and at the end of the business day. They will be measured on their ability to handle the traffic at these times. Application architects need to design their apps to handle all eventualities.

3. Where do the performance bottlenecks occur - Application, Network or Server?

It varies depending on the organization and the maturity of their environment. However, in most environments, it is a little of everything. Each component must be tuned for the specific environment and performance needs. There is no "one size fits all" to this problem.

That being said, we often find that organizations have less understanding or information about the applications than any other component.

4. How do you distinguish/measure between availability and usability?

Availability is a term that is used by internal IT organizations to define when an application is operational or "available" for use. This is a macro level view into the overall "health" of an application. It's a very binary way of thinking -- the application is either on or off.

Usability is an end-user centric measurement that reaches beyond availability to include responsiveness and performance consistency to define when an application is "usable" by the end-user. High availability does not equal high usability!

By aligning to and measuring "usability" oriented metrics, IT organizations can ensure that the services they deliver are and will continue to meet the needs of the business.

5. Why Application Performance Management?

Application Performance Management is important throughout the life cycle of any business application from the initial design and impact assessment through deployment into day to day operations. Without meaningful measurements, the effectiveness and impact of any business process can not be determined. For on-line applications, responsiveness and usability become the ultimate performance measurement when considering the end-user completing the business transaction.

6. Why do I need Application Performance Management (APM)?

Today’s enterprise organizations depend heavily on the business applications that run their business. Despite all of the ways that a network, system or device can be measured, the end-user perceives only two things about an application: is it available and is it usable. APM provides IT organizations with the means to assess the availability of an application and to measure the usability of that application from an end-user's perspective. For CIO’s to be certain that the service their organization delivers is meeting the quality of service demanded by their customer, APM must become a core component of their operational processes.

7. How does APM differ from, add/or replace other operational management functions, such as network management?

Traditionally, IT organizations have taken a component centric approach to managing the IT environment. APM is not a replacement for network or systems management tools, rather a necessary extension providing insight to the application performance and usability.

8. What are the different techniques for implementing APM solutions?

There are three different techniques for deploying APM based solutions.

Agent Based - The most commonly understood approach is to install management agents on application servers and or desktops to gather management information that can be processed by a centralized management station. If properly deployed, this technique can provide a detailed understanding of the application’s availability and interaction with system level resources. While this approach can be comprehensive if fully deployed, it is generally expensive and difficult to administer.

Synthetic Transactions – Born out of the testing industry, a synthetic transaction tool generates simulated end-user transactions to assess the availability and performance of an application. This approach can be very effective in assessing the availability of an application, but cannot provide an accurate view of application performance or usability.

Transaction Analysis – A network based approach that gathers an analyzing application and protocol information as it flows across the network. Through the use of flow classification technology, application conversations are identified and monitored at a transaction level for every user, every application and every use. This technique provides an accurate end-to-end view of an application’s performance and usability, but cannot provide detailed system level information.

The NEXVU solution is based on a Transaction Analysis approach.

Product

9. Why NEXVU Technologies?

NEXVU provides an effective solution for measuring and monitoring on-line application performance from the end-users perspective. A tool completely designed and developed using Flow-based classification and analysis, the NEXVU Analyzer provides a top down view of networked applications focusing on the end-user experience.

10. What is the NEXVU APM solution?

The NEXVU application performance monitoring and analysis solution consists of a distributed architecture, including a network-based passive appliance deployed near groups of end-users that monitors and analyzes application traffic in real-time. A Command Center appliance provides the global enterprise-wide view and administration over all remote analyzers.

11. What applications does NEXVU support?

The NEXVU Analyzer has extensive out of the box support for over 900+ protocols comprising 3200 application profiles. A sampling of the supported applications can be found here.

12. What if I have homegrown applications?

Customers have the ability to extend the NEXVU Analyzer to include support for proprietary applications and protocols. Through an intuitive configuration panel, a customer can specify the application name, its protocol mapping, optional host mapping and even upload visual decodes for detailed packet analysis.

13. How does NEXVU’s approach to APM relate to the IETF APM MIB or the ART MIB?

The APM MIB and the proprietary Application Response Time (ART) MIB provide an approach for the collection and measurement of application performance information. While the NEXVU solution does not directly support the APM or ART MIBS, it is based on the principles defined in the APM MIB.

14. Can I integrate the NEXVU solution into my existing management tools and environment?

Yes. The NEXVU Analyzer can be integrated to leverage and/or extend existing management tools that may already exist within a customer environment. Through the use of SNMP TRAPS, alerts generated at the Analyzer can be sent to a higher level monitoring tool for analysis. In addition, the NEXVU Analyzer supports RMON I, RFC (2819) and RMON II, RFC (2021), Netflow v5 and v8 as well as ODBC for integration into existing reporting and capacity planning tools.

15. Does the NEXVU Solution tell me what the root cause of the performance problem is?

No. The NEXVU APM solution provides detailed information that can be used by either automated root cause analysis tools or by operational personnel to determine the reason for application performance degradation and/or outage.

16. Can the NEXVU solution replace my packet analyzers and RMON probes?

Yes. The NEXVU Analyzer has a powerful packet capture facility that supports real-time and background captures with extensive support filtering and decoding. Packet captures can be exported to .pcap format for import into third party products.

17. What is a Flow?

A flow is a collection of packets that constitutes a message exchange between two computing end-points. For example, the typical request / response exchange in a client server environment or the continuous stream of multimedia packets in a VoIP conversation.

18. Why is Flow Analysis critical?

Flow analysis is critical to understanding application performance because it measures the actual application characteristics as they occur to the end-user. In most environments, a flow is a collection of many application message exchanges that occur over relatively long periods (seconds to hours). As conditions change, measuring the setup, network utilization, and end of a flow does not provide insight into the behavior experienced by the end-user.

19. Does the NEXVU solution generate traffic?

Application performance information is collected in a completely passive manner.

20. How do I deploy the NEXVU Analyzer?

The NEXVU analyzer is a turnkey network-based passive appliance that is designed to be connected to the network near the end-user for best performance results.

21. What type of network connectivity is required?

At least one monitoring port connection to a LAN switch/router mirror port (SPAN™) or in-line tap and a 10/100 BaseT management connection is required for the Analyzer.

22. Is DHCP supported for the management network connectivity?

The NEXVU Analyzer requires a static IP address.

23. How much traffic is added to the network?

The NEXVU solution is designed to be deployed in remote locations over low speed WAN connections (56 kbps dial-up modem) without consuming all bandwidth resources.

24. How many users can the Analyzer support?

In a typical business environment, an end user workstation will generate 5 to 10 simultaneous flows. Therefore, an entry level Analyzer supporting 25,000 concurrent flows will support up to 2500 to 5000 typical users.

25. Can I deploy the analyzer in the Data Center?

The NEXVU Analyzer can certainly be deployed in the data center to measure server performance and application usage, provided it is loaded appropriately. End-user application performance accuracy and remote visibility will be limited with this deployment location.

26. Is Asymmetric routing supported?

Asymmetric routed environments are supported with a multi-port Analyzer using the port binding feature. Multiple interface ports can be bound to provide a single virtual interface.

27. Once connected, how long before performance information can be obtained?

The Analyzer begins collecting and processing flow performance information immediately. Performance data will be available within the Status window for observation, within the refresh period, provided traffic is presented to the monitoring port.

28. Where is the collected data stored?

The Analyzer collects, analyzes and stores all application performance and traffic measurements onto the local drive of the Analyzer.

29. How long can performance information be stored?

The Workgroup Analyzer can store 15 Million flows worth of detailed metrics. The larger systems can store up to 700 Million flows worth of detailed metrics.

17 days of detailed information (15 Million flows)

Assuming: 5000 flows during an 8 hour work period
500 flows during off hours
.5 % flow turnover rate

80 days of detailed information (700 Million flows)

Assuming: 50,000 flows during an 8 hour work period
5,000 flows during off hours
.5% flow turnover rate

30. How do I back-up the data?

All configuration information and scheduled reports can be backed-up to an external TFTP or FTP server or your local workstation. You can use the link on the Dashboard to open the Backup & Restore “Config” Panel and either perform an ad hoc backup or schedule backups periodically.

31. What is a Monitor?

A Monitor is a rules-driven metric collection, recording and alerting function within the Analyzer. Each monitor is based upon a measurement metric with the ability to filter and narrow the field of observation. For example, a monitor can be defined to observe, collect and alert on application response time for the Microsoft Exchange™ service focused on a single server for a group of users.

A monitor can be as granular as a single user to server conversation for a given application or as coarse as all activity on the network.

32. How many monitors can I define?

There is no hard limitation to the number of monitors that can be defined. Limitations are a function of system loading including number of concurrent flows, flow turnover rate and monitor resolution. Loaded with 10,000 concurrent active flows, a turnover rate below 1% and 1 minute monitor resolution, the Workgroup Analyzer will support well over a hundred flow monitors.

33. Can a monitor generate a report?

All Monitors can generate an interactive or a scheduled report.

34. Can a monitor generate an email alert?

All Monitors have the ability to set an alert threshold where a notification event is triggered that will send an email message to a given email address or an SNMP Trap to an SNMP management console.

35. Can I generate a report on-demand?

All reports can be generated on-demand (Interactive) or through the reporting scheduling function.

36. Can I run daily/weekly/monthly reports?

Scheduled reports are extremely flexible. Yearly/Monthly/Weekly/Daily/Hourly/Minute reports can be scheduled to run on any 5 minute boundary.

37. Can I save a report?

Reports can be exported in several formats: .pdf .png .jpeg .pcl .ps .html .txt and .csv

38. Can I automatically send a report to someone?

Scheduled reports can be emailed to a single individual, groups of individuals or a list. Additionally, all scheduled reports can be viewed by anyone with an account through the Web Portal interface.