Xangati Rapidly Identifies Application, Network Performance Problems

Profiling of applications, endpoints helps IT pinpoint source of performance problems

• By James E. Powell
• 06/18/2007

Xangati today announced its rapid problem identification (RPI) appliance family that uses "precision profiling" to enable network operations to "pinpoint the sources of application and network performance issues across the enterprise."

Xangati's RPI products lets IT view the application behavior of every endpoint and displays the application delivery infrastructure to which the endpoints belong.

Xangati says its RPI products can:

• Auto-discover all active IP endpoints and all applications across an organization’s LAN and WAN

• Precisely profile each endpoint, provide “a normalized view of applications produced and used, application performance, typical interactions, and other factors”

• Detect in real time atypical endpoint or application behavior and analyzed to identify the source of the problem

• Scale to 100,000 distinct endpoints and applications per appliance

• Perform its work non-intrusively and passively without agents or probes

Xangati provides a “comprehensive view of how all the endpoints -- desktops, servers, storage devices, VoIP phones, video cameras, PDAs -- are interacting with each other and with the multiplicity of applications running across our infrastructure," according to Paul Roybal, CIO of Bernalillo County, New Mexico, in a Xangati release. "Almost right away, my team could see the sources of multiple complex application responsiveness issues, which included a sluggish email server, an intermittent DNS failure, and an endpoint hijacked for spamming. Already our problem identification cycles have shrunk by at least one-third, and trouble tickets are being closed 20 percent faster."

According to Xangati, IT spends more time identifying and locating the sources of problems than resolving them. Typically IT is first notified by end users of problems (typically reporting sluggish application or network performance), keeping network operations personnel in tactical, reactive mode instead of focusing on strategic issues. The company says “the vast majority of core problems arise from misuse of endpoints or applications, not from the network itself,” which their product can identify.

Once installed on an enterprise network, Xangati says, “appliances use flow information (NetFlow, sFlow, cFlow) or packets available from existing enterprise switches and routers to automatically discover all the IP endpoints (known and unknown).” Since proper management of IT depends on a complete understanding of the environment, Xangati’s products may have have an additional benefit to IT. Xangati says that this discovery process has, in every deployment to date, discovered 25 to 50 percent more endpoints than the organization had previously identified.

After discovery, the appliance builds a profile of each endpoint across a range of measures, including “bit rate (in and out), packet rate (in and out), burstiness, interactions, endpoint affinity, application affinity, location affinity, and time affinity” to establish a baseline of “normal” behavior across time, application, and location.

Because Xangati RPI products work across network silos, they can more accurately identify problem sources, the company says. “Industry research indicates that, on average, six service desk calls are needed just to identify the owner of a typical network problem.”

The Xangati RPI product family is available in three models: the X100, X500, and X1000 vary by processor speed and memory, beginning at $35,000.

A product data sheet is available at http://www.xangati.com/download/Xangati_Brochure.pdf. For more information about the company, visit http://www.xangati.com.