Network Instruments Expands Insight into UC, Virtual, and Distributed Environments
Updated Observer Infrastructure integrates advanced flow technologies for app visibility across complex networks.
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Network Instruments, a specialist in network and application performance monitoring, has updated its resource and infrastructure monitoring solution, Observer Infrastructure (OI), with expanded visibility and monitoring of applications as well as complex virtual and cloud environments.
By integrating advanced flow technologies such as Flexible NetFlow, IPFIX, Citrix AppFlow, and Cisco Medianet Performance Monitor, OI queries systems, applications, and critical resources to provide advanced insight into the services and conversations traversing the infrastructure.
IT teams can now utilize NetFlow and IPFIX within OI to obtain detailed traffic metrics to improve troubleshooting, assess bandwidth usage, and optimize infrastructure performance. In addition, with product support for AppFlow, OI now provides enhanced analysis of applications traversing Citrix virtual environments. Capturing AppFlow records generated by Citrix Netscaler application delivery controllers, OI tracks application status codes, average request response times, and average turn response times. These new metrics are correlated with existing application and infrastructure data, providing a complete view of performance.
“When expanding networks through cloud, virtualization, or building remote sites, teams are often forced to sacrifice visibility,” said Charles Thompson, director of product strategy for Network Instruments. “With Network Instruments, engineers do not face those limitations. OI allows teams to track resource and infrastructure health regardless of the environment, preemptively detecting issues before they impact service delivery. OI also serves as a component of our overall performance management platform, which combines intelligence from flow technologies and packet analysis presenting a complete picture of IT activity.”
As companies expand use of video and voice, integrated views of communications and the underlying infrastructure are essential for ensuring consistent performance. The newest OI version supports Cisco endpoints monitoring, offering complete video and voice session views from the call manager to the Cisco desktop client or handset. In addition, organizations with Cisco Medianet can use advanced OI tracking to monitor media communications traversing Medianet-enabled devices. OI reports on critical quality metrics including jitter, latency, packet loss, MOS, and conceal ratios.
OI has enhanced its tracking of critical virtual and cloud components to provide seamless performance monitoring across environments. The latest version increases insight into VMware virtual networks by adding monitoring of vCenter. Network engineers can track the management, provisioning, and updating of VMware vSphere hosts.
OI also expanded monitoring of critical cloud components. Organizations using Amazon AWS will now be able to query and validate the performance of the Amazon DynamoDB managed service and the elastic load-balancing capability of EC2 environments.
More information is available at www.networkinstruments.com.