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.