CA NetQoS Performance Center [EOL] Reviews

The most valuable feature I think is the ability to go in and perform updates yourself. You can change around any of the parameters and different types of dashboards you want. If you want bar charts or heat maps or anything like that, you can go in change the different graph types.

I also like some of the canned dashboards that come out-of-the-box -- the infrastructure, server, and services overview.

We use it for monitoring our network, MPOS, and top-trending interfaces that are either over-utilized or under-utilized. We're then able to change the bandwidth of those accordingly and save money.

It also help us with the back-end stuff, such as authentication as we have people all over the world trying to log on.

To be honest, we have not really had a lot of experience with this tool. We sort of installed it to meet a customer request requirement. It was an early version of the product about almost four years ago now. It didn't get much focus beyond that initial deployment. Now there is a renewed high interest in the product, so we have upgraded to the latest release.

We understand that the product still has some growing pains, but we are impressed by the ability to integrate that product with Spectrum and with other tools. One of the things we want to focus on here is understanding the APIs for both Spectrum and for Performance Center so that we can more tightly integrate those products with other tools that we use.

One of the key benefits is doing the performance management piece where you can crack the utilization of network connections and see where your block points are, and if you have errors happening that effect performance that you don't necessarily see as alarms. You can set thresholds inside the Performance Center for those alarms.

I think it's a good product to pull data together in an easy-to-search-through fashion, instead of having a lot of different individual solutions. It provides SNMP traffic statistics instead of alarms, which Spectrum provides instead.d

It gives us an easier way to start troubleshooting problems. It lets us dig more granularly, so if we saw something come in a couple hours ago the old way of looking at the stats was very, "This is what you're going to get," but now you can dig down and say, "I want to see the specific time frame," or even "I want to dig back days ago and see a two-hour block of what was going on and try to isolate what caused it."

CA Application Delivery Analysis (ADA)
When it comes to application and client slowness, this module is able to monitor and analyze TCP packets between clients and servers, providing network metrics, latency, TTL and more. It comes with a friendly GUI, filter, and report function, is easy for management level to understand, and helps network engineers narrow down the problem area.

CA Network Flow Analysis (NFA)
This module gives you both live and historical network traffic data. Shows which application IP, protocol, or client IP is using the bandwidth, or whether it is an ISP issue.

CA NetVoyant
Some applications are very sensitive to latency, jitter and bandwidth (they cannot mix with other traffic). This module helps by providing device status, device metrics, and device utilization.

CA Event Manager
For critical processes that we may need to monitor 24/7, this module helps collect alarms, traps and log streams. This enables the operations team take action quickly.

With this product's help, it can greatly ease:

1. Troubleshooting slow issues based on flow data.
2. Troubleshooting high bandwidth utilization and tracking down the root cause.
3. Bandwidth usage reporting for bandwidth capacity planning.