Network Diagramming Channel Feature

Network Diagramming Provider OPNET Talks Application Performance, IT Management with TMCnet

By Carrie Schmelkin
TMCnet Web Editor

When it comes to IT performance management, if you are a network manager we certainly don’t have to tell you what a nightmare it can be – you are living it, after all. From making sure that networks remain secure and efficient to managing application delivery and performance to handling migrations to the cloud, network management has quickly become a cumbersome task that is leaving many managers feeling exasperated.

Fortunately for IT managers out there, OPNET Technologies (News - Alert) centers its business upon bringing IT performance management relief to various companies and over the past two decades it has done just that.

“Networking people historically think about packets and links and flows and things like that so if you want to tease out relevant application information it’s actually a very tricky problem,” Todd Kaloudis, senior vice president of business development and global channels at OPNET, told TMCnet at Interop (News - Alert) 2012 recently. “That’s what our company OPNET focuses on – making sense of that data.”

“The network is more important than ever to not only deliver the applications but as a key place to monitor them,” he added. 

According to OPNET, as in past years, the word on the expo floor this year at INTEROP was that businesses in the healthcare, financial and retail sectors, for example, are more dependent on applications than ever before but now networking and application architectures are more complex as well.

Consequently, keeping tabs on performance and making sure that apps are performing well is a “pretty hot field,” according to Kaloudis.

But making sure that apps perform well is a tricky business as it is often difficult to get meaningful application information out of network traffic. Moreover, it is oftentimes difficult to get deep inside the internals of the application. That’s where OPNET comes in.

“For people that are grappling with this big data problem – they have all this data, they have networks, applications, server farms, mobile users – we make it very quick and very easy for them to solve a problem in production,” Kaloudis said. “We can very rapidly help them pinpoint where the problem is and what investment they need to make to fix it; that’s the main thing that people come to us.”

OPNET also helps people who are responsible for devops and ensuring that companies that have really important applications can make sure that the application is up to par before it is rolled out.

For more on network diagramming and OPNET, click here.