NETSCOUT Systems Introduces the Application Fabric Performance Management Architecture; Comprehensive Solution to Reduce Mean Time to Repair for Performance Problems in Complex Application Architectures

03 May 2006

WESTFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 3, 2006--NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT), a leading provider of application and network performance management solutions, today announced the Application Fabric Performance Management (AFPM) Architecture, which will serve as the basis for new products to address compound, multi-tier and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application infrastructures. In support of current and future customers implementing these new infrastructures, NetScout will add new enterprise-scale automated problem detection, diagnostic and reporting capabilities to its nGenius(R) Performance Management System products, which are already widely deployed at leading enterprise, service provider and government customer networks.

The application fabric is the set of interconnected virtualized resources implemented over the physical infrastructure (servers, network and storage) and shared by both traditional and emerging applications. While traditional applications have been based on a simple client-server model, emerging applications are increasingly distributed and multi-tiered. These new application architectures are designed to yield significant benefits in reusability, scalability and responsiveness to the needs of the business. However, these benefits can be negated, and service performance and availability compromised, by the added fragility of the distributed model. This is due to the complex interactions and dependencies between multiple service elements and contention for shared and virtualized resources.

While attempts by the industry will be made to deliver an application fabric that is more robust via faster network connections, more powerful servers and application accelerators, such physical infrastructure upgrades alone will be insufficient to ensure service levels in the new environment - a new performance management approach is also required. Today's tools were designed for traditional client-server applications and thus are narrowly focused on the servers, the applications or the network. Further, existing tools are overly dependent on the human operator to detect and correct performance problems. The result is that it takes too long to detect, isolate and resolve performance issues in today's and tomorrow's application fabric environments.

NetScout will deliver new solutions based on the AFPM architecture to mitigate these shortcomings by monitoring the behavior of applications in conjunction with their underlying fabric resources. The AFPM architecture addresses the scalability and responsiveness challenges inherent in managing massively distributed and virtualized application infrastructures. This approach will give operators a major head start in preventing or resolving service disruptions, leading to significantly reduced Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) by:

1. Continuously monitoring and automatically detecting performance problems on designated applications and business services;

2. Performing automated diagnostics, providing for first order isolation to the likely root cause of the problem in the application fabric;

3. Delivering real-time notification on the detected anomalies and root cause, along with the identification of the impacted business services;

4. Providing detailed information including recorded application flows and diagnostic capabilities for subsequent in-depth troubleshooting and forensic analysis; and

5. Presenting historical reports and trending on the monitored metrics for validating problem resolution, for performance tuning, for resource planning, and for documenting service levels.

The technology innovation underlying AFPM is the Analytic Domain(TM), a combination of intelligent monitoring based on NetScout's patent-pending Common Data Model (CDM) technology and automated analysis capabilities, using the patented statistical analysis methods within NetScout's Progressive Analytics(TM) technology. Using a "divide-and-conquer" approach, each Analytic Domain(TM) manages a subset of the application fabric (e.g. the Web server or database tier), and multiple Analytic Domains cooperate to manage the entire fabric, spanned by a business service.

Analytic Domains collect advanced real-time performance data from NetScout Probes and continuously analyze the information to detect abnormal behaviors (anomalies). Application performance anomalies are automatically diagnosed by correlation with other anomalies in additional metrics collected from applications, servers and network devices within the Domain. The results from multiple Analytic Domains are combined and presented to operators in the form of actionable warnings, alarms, real-time views and reports. In addition, depending on the choice of instrumentation, Analytic Domains will also record application traffic for in-depth troubleshooting or forensic purposes. By dividing the application fabric into largely autonomous "domains", highly scalable management and monitoring solutions can be quickly and effectively deployed at the enterprise, geographical and organizational levels, as well as across a discrete set of IT resources.

The Analytic Domain technology will be delivered to NetScout's customers in multiple phases. Initially, it combines nGenius(R) Analytics (a new product announced today-http://www.netscout.com/news/06/0503a.asp) with nGenius Probe and NetFlow data for early detection and initial diagnosis of performance problems. The next phase, to be delivered by the end of 2006, will additionally draw upon third-party application performance data and additional fabric metrics to deliver more comprehensive detection and diagnostic capabilities.

"Massively distributed applications are clearly the trend in both IT and service provider software-as-a-service," said Tom Nolle of CIMI Corp., a networking consulting and analysis firm. "These new computing frameworks make traditional monitoring obsolete, and NetScout has stepped up to the issue by conceptualizing a completely new approach. By looking at resources as an 'application fabric' that can be stretched across the campus or around the world, they've addressed the scale of application networking's future. By dividing that fabric into Analytic Domains, they've made it possible to address that kind of scale in a modular, extensible way that meshes not only with the way that network and application technology support each other, but the way that support and operations processes support both. I'm looking forward to their roll-out of this concept because I think it's a major step forward in the way that resources are monitored."

"Managing distributed applications, whether n-tier, compound, or SOA-based, presents an order of magnitude greater complexity than managing client-server implementations," said Anil Singhal, president and CEO of NetScout. "Business services draw on many resources, which in turn may depend on other resources, in an interwoven combination of paths and dependencies that can be best likened to an 'application fabric', rather than a simple network. Traditional methods of performance management are no longer sufficient; NetScout's new approach is needed, and is one that transforms our already superior performance information into actionable knowledge. That is why we developed the AFPM architecture and supporting technologies."

In order to leverage customers' existing enterprise management systems, NetScout is partnering with industry leaders to leverage data from market-leading management tools (e.g. quality-of-experience metrics), as well as provide knowledge to partner dashboards in standard formats for reporting and analysis. In AFPM, performance knowledge will also be delivered to partners as highly qualified events with evidence, supporting contextual launch of reporting and diagnostics functions within the nGenius Solution.

About NetScout Systems

NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT) is a market leader and pioneer of integrated application and network performance management products and solutions that help IT organizations assure critical business services across the enterprise. More than 3000 leading companies and government organizations worldwide have deployed NetScout's nGenius(R) Performance Management System to increase their return on infrastructure investments by optimizing the performance of networks and applications according to business priorities. NetScout is headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts and has offices worldwide. Further information is available at http://www.netscout.com.

NetScout and the NetScout logo, nGenius, and Quantiva are registered trademarks of NetScout Systems, Inc. The CDM logo, MasterCare and the MasterCare logo, Progressive Analytics, and Analytic Domain, are trademarks of NetScout Systems, Inc. Other brands, product names and trademarks are property of their respective owners. NetScout reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to make changes at any time in its technical information and specifications, and service and support programs.

CONTACT: NetScout Systems, Inc.
Dylan Locsin, 978-614-4113
locsind@netscout.com
www.netscout.com
or
Davies Murphy Group
Brian Alberti, 781-418-2403
netscout@daviesmurphy.com

SOURCE: NetScout Systems, Inc.