Application Performance Management

Net Optics, a provider of real-time network visibility solutions, has launched appTap, which the company claims is the industry's first integrated network and application performance management “Tap” designed for remote sites.

Featuring a built-in Tap, appTap reduces the complexity in network and application management and increases automation capabilities. It eliminates the need for costly onsite engineering support, enabling telcos to lower the costs by tens of thousands of dollars per year.

This simple, plug-and-play solution with remote access provides real-time visibility into remote networks and application performance. appTap captures and analyzes network traffic, application activity and monitors Voice Over IP (VoIP) calls. The solution pinpoints performance issues such as low-quality VoIP due to jitter, underperforming applications, and insufficient network bandwidth.

“Small satellite offices and remote branch sites face the same network and application management challenges of large data centers, but have few or no engineers on staff and smaller IT budgets,” said Sharon Besser, vice president of technology for Net Optics (News - Alert), in a statement.

According to Besser, appTap eliminates downtime by enabling total visibility into both network traffic and application performance, helping the businesses quickly isolate problems before they interrupt the business and affect revenues.

appTap offers three levels of monitoring visibility based on business needs, including network, application and session monitoring. 

Network Monitoring collects network data, generates and consumes NetFlow records and exports NetFlow records for use by third-party flow analysis tools. Application monitoring adds network monitoring to flow monitoring, analysis and report tools that break down network use by layer, protocol and application. Session Monitoring offers the benefits of network and application monitoring as well as the ability to troubleshoot VoIP calls. 

The appTap will be showcased at Cisco Live! from March 29 to April 1. The solution will be available globally in 2Q 2011 and will be sold through select partners and VARs.

Back in February, Net Optics launched the Phantom Virtual Tap, which provides total visibility of inter-vm traffic passing between virtual servers on hypervisor stacks, giving enterprise IT managers the ability to monitor, analyze, audit and report on that traffic.