It is clear from the headlines that IT professionals in enterprises and service provider organizations have their hands full. From data breaches to compliance to assuring quality customer experiences, the job of IT professionals of managing their networks and “E”verything that attaches to runs over them has become exponentially more difficult.  The last few years have unfortunately been eventful, and the trend is accelerating. 

In the “new normal” in which IT lives, having the best tools for getting not just visibility but a deep view in real time and comprehensive analytics, along with the ability to remediate problems efficiently and effectively has become a critical requirement. In many instances, it has become an urgent matter as traditional solutions going right up the stack have proven insufficient as the speed at which things change and become less predictable has increased. The challenge for those seeking solutions is in evaluating where they are, what they need going forward and who they should look to when it comes to network management software and appliances.   A recently released market report by IDC (News - Alert) says that Westford, MA-based NetScout Systems, Inc. is a vendor worth investigating. 

The IDC report stated that NetScout (News - Alert) grew more than five times faster than the overall $2.6 billion network management software and appliance market in 2012, which grew at 3.1 percent. This represented a 16.3 percent growth for NetScout from 2011 to 2012. In addition, the company outpaced the next two competitors who both lost market share during the same period.

“Although 2012 growth over 2011 was a somewhat disappointing year for the distributed network management software market, primarily a reflection of the depressed global economy, NetScout performed exceptionally well during 2012,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, network infrastructure, IDC. “IT-enabled operational effectiveness is the watchword across all industries for all business processes, and network-based service delivery is an especially challenging case in point. With the recent introduction of nGeniusONE, IDC believes that NetScout is very well positioned to continue addressing key market trends driving the growth of this segment by providing unique service-oriented visibility into networks, applications and users as service quality and availability needs to become more transparent to more users including application owners and business executives.”

The nGeniusONE™ Unified Performance Management platform converges application and network performance management functionality into a single platform that delivers a top-down, service-focused perspective of performance characteristics of all infrastructure and application elements associated with service delivery. This allows IT organizations to manage the health and availability of diverse application environments to identify performance issues, more effectively triage impact, and quickly identify the root cause of problems.

“Our vision and strategy continues to be focused on providing a unified approach to application and network performance management to deliver a top-down, holistic view into end-to-end service delivery” said Steven Shalita (News - Alert), vice president, marketing, NetScout. “We are the only vendor that provides a single source of real-time layer four through seven analytics based on a common set of metadata to improve communication and collaboration across the different functional IT groups to enable a unified approach to managing service delivery for complex, distributed IT environment.”

Solving the complexities of network performance management challenges

The need for IT to expand service monitoring capabilities is undeniable. IT has growing requirements to strengthen performance management, service delivery management, security management, forensics, and other monitoring strategies. Indeed, the continued growth of network monitoring devices and diversity in connectivity and traffic access requirements pose a complex challenge to achieving the pervasiveness and scale required for effective support of the targeted monitoring applications. These expansive strategies require advanced packet-flow access solutions to overcome the problems of traditional approaches as well as the scalability and manageability limitations of existing monitoring switches.

NetScout will be exploring all of this in an insightful webinar I will be hosting, “Scaling Your Network Monitoring Architecture,” Wednesday July 31, 2013 2:00 PM ET/ 11:00 AM PT. Join me and Ahmed Abdelhalim (News - Alert), Sr. Product Marketing Manager, NetScout as we explore:  

• The shortcomings of existing techniques for provisioning access to network traffic
• The essential requirements for transparent and scalable monitoring fabrics
• The role of packet-flow intelligence, density, and scale in achieving pervasive monitoring and extending the longevity of the overall monitoring architecture
• How to seamlessly manage and provision large-scale, distributed monitoring fabrics
• Sample use cases highlighting how to expand the monitoring capability across the network layers from the border and deep into multi-layer server farms for better performance management and security

As noted above, the world of network performance monitoring and management has become complicated and traditional approaches no longer are adequate. Find out why this is the case and what your organization can and should be considering in assuring your network is providing optimal performance and is ready for whatever the “new normal” may require.