Which is the best AANPM product? Should we be considering anything besides for Riverbed?

As Mike Wellman indicated previously when you consider the following:
1. "All-In" (think All-in-One) 2. Ease of use and 3. Affordable
> it's a good thing you're looking at Fluke Networks TruView solution
a. Quick and easy to deploy and capable of scaling easily in small to very large enterprises
b. Simple & guided workflows means it wont become shelfware
c. Definitely affordable and the return on investment is quickly realized

Phillip,

Thanks for considering Visual TruView from Fluke Networks. I would recommend touching base with some actual users to get an opinion on real world usage and workflows since it sounds like you will have a variety of skill levels potentially using the solution. Many users are available for discussion on the Visual TruView pages of IT Central Station. I am also happy to arrange a deeper discussion directly with a user in your vertical.

I am also a newbie for AANPM but it's important to give efficient application performance delivery.

I've had good experiences with Fluke products.

Regards,
K.Satish kumar

Yes there are other vendors to consider. Cisco integrates the WAAS ( wide area application acceleration services) platform as part of their data center product portfolio. Typically suited towards enterprise deployments. There is also Silverpeak, which has some easily configurable "plug and play" solutions catered more towards the small/medium size market. It really comes down to a various factors when choosing the correct platform, here are some to consider for product evaluation:
- application type
- compression requirements
- bandwidth requirements
- manageability
- operational functionality/support

My team and I have extensive experience with these deployments.

Let me know if you'd like to discuss this further.
Thanks !

On premise based solutions we have tried over the years:
Fluke Optiview
NetScout
CA NetQOS
Solar Winds
LanCope (currently in use by our corp/UC team... scaling for Data Center
is expensive)

Cloud based solutions tried by our developers:
SevOne
Boundary

SFlow reference on collectors
www.sflow.org/products/collectors.php

The point to know when comparing, is to see how many flows you need to
analyze. Most Netflow products will dig into the top 20 flows. I need to
look into the top 1000... there is a vast difference in Netflow collectors
ability to handle huge flow volumes.

Also something to consider, is whether your network gear can handle full
flows, or just sampled flows. Most SFlow gear (F5, Silverpeak, VMWare)
will only send sampled flows. Many Cisco devices were purchased for base
routing.... when the CPU cycles on the router are required to track and
maintain state of high volumes of flows, then HSRP, VLAN, and routing
processes may become flakey.

Cisco 10 GB interfaces are recommended to only sample 10% of the flows.
Cisco 40GB and higher interfaces are only recommended to sample 1% of the
flows.

Soooo... it depends both on the flow generation, and the flow collection,
how many / how deep you are looking to review in the flows. From there,
you can let the vendors know how many flows you want to review. Some
vendors will self eliminate, when high flow volumes are required.

We have a Cascade deployment we are building as a POC. The Riverbed gear
has been delivered. We are pushing to see how many flows we can generate
on the Cisco 10gb gear (with reasonable performance of routing, HSRP, and
spanning tree), while collecting on the Cascade. From there we will review
Juniper routers, F5 load balancers, and Silverpeak WAN optimizers.

The end goal is to find all gear that a flow traverses, and identify if
there are any anomalies in the path.

We use the Riverbed ARX, App Sensor, and Dashboards. We are looking to tie
together these tools in the dashboards with the Cascade product line. If
we can scale it properly, our developers and ops teams will be very happy.
I should know more in the next 3-6 months, regarding the integration, and
scaling of NetFlow in our environment.

Best of luck to you,
-Ted

Phil,

Sounds like you're already planning to check out Fluke Networks Visual TruView. If you want a more complete listing of the other products in the space you can view the full Gartner NPM-D Magic Quadrant report, as well as EMA's AANPM Radar Report on our website. That will give you an overview of most of the other solutions in this market. You can view the full reports at www.flukenetworks.com/Gartner and www.flukenetworks.com/EMA

Definitely look at Compuware's aaNPM Data Centre Real User Monitoring (DCRUM). There are a number of benefits when you monitor on the wire (either by TAP or SPAN) rather than polling devices for stats.

In my experiences, any reputable solution for AANPM needs three comprehensive capabilities:

1. "All-In". Too many solutions provide a base application that offers a subset of capabilities (bandwidth monitoring of networking infrastructure, as an example) and upgrade modules that offer the "rounded out" full solution. Do you want performance monitoring at the application level? There is a module for that. How about monitoring your virtual environment? Sure, we can sell you a module for that. This approach gets both complex and expensive and quite often results in environments having gap-outs in their coverage either due to budget constraints or departmental silo approaches.
2. Ease of use. Monitoring tools are supposed to make your IT job easier...not create more mundane work for an already taxed staff. Make sure that the solution is easy to install and easy to maintain.
3. Affordable, with flexibility and scale. Monitoring solutions should not only be attainable for the largest enterprises, but also to smaller entities. Whether monitoring 100 devices or applications or 100,000, the solution should be equally beneficial to all environments.

If you agree that these three attributes are important to you as part of your evaluation, I would strongly recommend a review of the German engineered, Paessler Router Traffic Grapher, AKA as PRTG.

You can try WhatsUpGold as Network, Application, & Server Monitoring as solution, see this link: www.whatsupgold.com/

WhatsUpGold is an award-winning IT management solutions including network, server and application performance monitoring software.

You can have a look at WhatsUp Gold Evaluation (it's a recorded webinar) info.whatsupgold.com/MaximingYourWhatsUpGoldEvaluation.html so that you can get an idea about the solution.

Any other information needed, please do not hesitate to let me know.

Hello,
NetScout, Cisco, Fluke Networks, and Network Instruments all make known
network monitoring tools which all comparable. I've worked with Riverbed
in the past with one of my customers. We were installing our VOIP system
and had a few integration items to address during implementation.
Support seemed very good and very willing to work with other vendors.
Thanks.

Hi,

We are using Opmanager from ManageEngine which works fine for us, Have not tried these other products as yet.

Thanks Tarjei, our main goal is to enable us to monitor application / network performance from the user to the back end servers of an application. We will be looking to fully monitor around 10-15 applications in total, so with this we need to be able to give access to our 2nd Level teams, and various application support teams where they only see their own application. Many of these teams will not have in depth understanding of raw packet data, so we need to be able to display a high level overview of the application health, which we can drill down into for root cause analysis.

I would at least take a look at Compuware's DCRUM portfolio, and compare the two.

What is the goal of implementing the solution?