Further to my previous post Part 1: Bridging the Gap with Application-Aware Network Performance Monitoring (AA-NPM) where-in I had discussed on the challenges of monitoring application performance from a network perspective and lack thereof of such solutions and why they are more relevant than ever, this post looks at possible solutions from CA technologies that enable application-driven network performance management (ANPM). These solutions deliver comprehensive, centralized views of all the metrics and measurements needed to understand, manage and optimize performance of critical applications running on the network.
CA Technologies delivers several robust products, including CA Application Delivery Analysis, CA Network Flow Analysis, and CA Unified Communications Monitor which can be used in tandem or individually, to address a range of technological and business imperatives. Through these integrated solutions, an enterprise can leverage a unified view of all the metrics being gathered, including application response times, network flow data, resource capacity, voice and video quality of service and more. Further, these offerings feature the open standards support that enables them to be effectively integrated with a range of third-party and custom IT management tools.
CA Application Delivery Analysis (ADA)
Understanding application response times between infrastructure components is critical to managing end-user experience, which is ultimately the most important measure of network performance. CA ADA delivers an end-to-end response time monitoring solution that enables your IT team to gain the insights it needs to optimize the end-user experience. With CA Application Delivery Analysis (ADA), you can isolate the source of bottlenecks and verify the performance of applications delivered over the network.
CA Network Flow Analysis (NFA)
NFA allows administrators to quickly troubleshoot issues, identify top users and applications, implement service quality policies and track their efficacy. With these capabilities, your administrators can manage the capacity of network resources to maximize the service levels of the most critical applications and services. It offers the visibility needed to distinguish between personal and business, and lower and higher priority activities, and to determine how the network is prioritizing various types of traffic, including rich-media applications.
CA Unified Communications Monitor (UCM) helps to:
- Track the specific performance metrics—such as mean opinion score (MOS), jitter, latency, call volume and utilization—that you need to maximize the quality of experience delivered by voice over IP and video applications
- Measure the impact of unified communications traffic on other applications
- Monitor quality, device health and performance of voice and video applications
- Gain the insights you need to identify type-of-service misconfigurations
- Report on key call set-up metrics and monitor calls in real time
Benefits
With the comprehensive, robust capabilities of AA-NPM solutions from CA Technologies, the network team can gain the visibility and intelligence it needs to understand the network within the context of the applications and services it supports. These solutions provide the visibility you need to efficiently manage complex, demanding enterprise networks. With these capabilities, an organization can realize a range of benefits:
- Boost service levels by delivering the immediate alerts, fast insights and intuitive workflows needed to reduce downtime and performance issues.
- Better manage costs and resources by providing data-driven insights regarding network capacity, quality of service policies, infrastructure investments and planned application and service roll-outs. These solutions also provide the insights to make more informed investment decisions to address evolving technical and business requirements.
- Deliver more business value by enabling organization to start making decisions based on rich data, rather than guesswork. By managing networks with a focus on optimizing applications and business services, your IT team can get out of reactive firefighting mode, and elevate the dialog with business leadership and users to focus on proactive planning, decision making and cost management.
To conclude, managing networks so they support optimal application performance has never been more challenging, or more critical. By leveraging AA-NPM solutions from CA Technologies, an organization can harness the robust and comprehensive capabilities it needs to understand and optimize how business-critical applications perform on the network.
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