NetScout Aims to Simplify Performance Management

Performance management is too complex.

That’s the stance of unified service delivery management provider NetScout (News - Alert), which recently unveiled a duo of products that aim to simplify performance management.

“In the past couple of months we’ve made a couple of interesting announcements that have really expanded beyond what people traditionally think of as performance management,” said NetScout vice-president of marketing Steven Shalita (News - Alert) during a conversation at the 2012 Interop conference in May.

The first is the company’s nGenius Packet Flow Switch, which dynamically aggregates and filters packet flows for more efficient and scalable network traffic monitoring.

“What’s unique about [the switch] is that it really changes the landscape of the performance management market,” Shalita said. “This is typically technology that’s been bought from third-party vendors. What we’re doing is really simplifying the architectural environment, bringing that into the same layer as the monitoring system itself to simplify vendor complexity but give them more control over network traffic and performance and management functions.”

He continued: “As the network monitoring switch market now changes, and we see some drive towards consolidation, NetScout is in a real good position to deliver greater value to our customers so they can work with single-vendor to really simplify their overall architecture.”

In April, the company also introduced nGenius Forensic Intelligence, an analysis module for the nGenius Service Assurance Solution that enables network operations and information security teams to accelerate forensic analysis of network traffic with automated, accurate and contextual session reconstruction and visual replay for security-focused investigations.

In the face of an evolving array of data security challenges, enterprises are now tuning their security strategies to create more data-centric focused approaches that strengthen their post-incident forensic analysis capabilities. Even with today’s network forensic tools, though, the ability to swiftly investigate security incidents by reconstructing and analyzing network activity has proven difficult and complicated.

nGenius Forensic Intelligence removes the complexity associated with network forensic analysis activities by delivering contextual visualization of IP communications sessions with automated reconstruction and contextual visual replay of a targeted session, enabling a incident investigator to see exactly what a user saw. The incident investigator can replay individual events, or all events sequentially in precise chronological order with a simple point-and-click action.

“We see the next frontier for performance management as being leveraged now more for security activities,” noted Shalita. nGenius Forensic Intelligence is part of that trend.

“That will prove to be extremely valuable in fraud investigations and other types of targeted activities,” he added. “But I think you will see that technology will also make a lot of sense as you leverage it to manage user experience more effectively as well. So, today a security play, tomorrow even more in the toolset of service management.”

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO. Follow us on Twitter.