SuperAgent 3.0, $29,500, NetQoS, (877) 835-9575, (512) 407-9443. www.netqos.com
Bruce Boardman is executive editor of Network Computing, testing and writing about network management and systems. He has 12 years' IT experience managing networks and distributed computing for a financial service provider. Write to him at Bruce Boardman at [email protected]. Trying to get a handle on your entire business takes easily understandable information about the network, systems and applications you operate. Our review of end-to-end performance management tools from Argent Software, Compuware, Concord Communications, NetQoS, NetScout and ProactiveNet focuses on the packages' usefulness in painting a clear picture of your IT systems' overall health. We considered their reporting abilities, root-cause analysis abilities, data collection, implementation, administration, pricing and "gotchas."
We awarded ProactiveNet's eponymous performance management suite Editor's Choice, primarily for its outstanding root-cause analysis features. More thoroughly than the competition, this product uses automatically created performance thresholds, logical groupings and its top-notch filtering ability to list the most likely sources of network trouble. We ran a Web server with an ASP application and pointed two communities of users at it. The first group used Mercury Interactive LoadRunner 7.51, letting us control the amount of load on the server. We varied the number from a few concurrent sessions to more than 100--more than enough to bring our test ASP application to a complete standstill and peg the Web servers' memory and CPU.
The second community was much smaller--just a few machines, routed through The Cloud 2.1, a WAN simulator from Shunra Software. In this way we could control the remote clients' throughput and response times. These clients executed robotic and actual transactions, which all the products monitor.
Both sets of user communities were routed to a shared switch, upon which a span port was created. We used a multiport NetOptics tap to connect all the probes to the span port.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
