NETSCOUT Introduces Next Generation Deep Packet Analysis Technology to Reveal a More Comprehensive End-to-End View of User Experience

03 Nov 2010

Adaptive Session Intelligence provides enterprises and service providers more scalable and granular visibility into the delivery of IP services across complex multi-domain and cloud environments to enable more comprehensive management of service delivery

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 03, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- NetScout(R) Systems, Inc., today announced Adaptive Session Intelligence(TM) (ASI) technology, a transformative real-time Deep Packet Analysis (DPA) engine that allows both enterprises and service providers to more effectively scale to understand and manage the user experience. Extending the capabilities of the nGenius(R) Service Assurance Solution, ASI technology dynamically tracks, captures and analyzes complex service delivery transactions across multi-domain IP networks allowing comprehensive real-time analysis of the performance of applications and services across physical and virtual environments. ASI technology dramatically increases the speed of detecting and troubleshooting service delivery problems across distributed service delivery architectures such as cloud-based services, enterprise data centers and branch and remote offices.

The network is the single common platform that interconnects all elements of infrastructure, services and the user. Consequently, network traffic has emerged as a powerful source to understanding the user experience across complex IP service delivery environments. Since traffic crossing an IP network carries the actual services and applications that a user consumes, it provides an inherently rich and contextual perspective of service interrelationships and their dependencies that more closely represents the user's experience than element monitoring or traditional application monitoring tools can. However, as new media-rich services drive increased traffic volumes and accelerate the adoption of 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, scaling to process, and analyzing and storing IP traffic in real time is becoming increasingly more difficult. This challenge is further exacerbated by increasing network and application complexity such as multi-tier application architectures, server virtualization and the increasing levels of physical and virtual multi-domain traffic flows driven by cloud-based services.

"With the increasing levels of complexity and sophistication of IP services, organizations need a more granular and scalable way to understanding transactions within a given user session," said Will Cappelli, research vice president at Gartner. "IT organizations need a more unified view into service delivery to understand the interrelationships of infrastructure and applications to have a better understanding of business services. This will not only improve their ability to identify emerging service quality issues more effectively, but will enable better collaboration and communications between network, application and operations management teams, improving the ability to identify those aspects of the end-user experience that lie beyond simple availability and intra-application component response time monitoring."

NetScout ASI technology transforms the power of the nGenius solution's Deep Packet Analysis by addressing the challenges associated with growing traffic volumes, increased service complexity and emerging multi-domain service delivery models. Using adaptive application recognition, ASI technology constructs "intelligent signatures" of user sessions to fully visualize the interrelated transactions occurring within a specific session for unprecedented visibility into complex multi-tier, multi-domain service delivery environments.

ASI technology dramatically increases the scale, depth and speed of the nGenius solution's analysis velocity by performing granular data mining as traffic is captured. This enables greater performance at scale while reducing the need for extensive back-end processing - allowing for the instant retrieval of session-oriented metrics and more flexible real-time analysis. ASI technology is dynamic and fully customizable for individual business requirements allowing for easy adaptation to specialized business-specific or vertical applications and services. ASI technology is architected to support next generation network technologies such as 40 and 100 Gigabit network interfaces and IP technologies such as IPv6, IMS, Video, VoIP and telepresence to allow for seamless support for new technology adoption by both enterprise and service provider customers.

More efficient storage and retrieval of session metrics

With ASI Technology, all network traffic is intelligently analyzed as it traverses the network enabling more granular real-time analysis of highly complex user sessions and their transactions. ASI metadata is generated, cross-indexed and correlated in real-time from continuously captured IP packets. ASI-based metadata is created for every user session and stored locally on distributed nGenius InfiniStream(R) appliances. This enables the nGenius Service Assurance Solution's analysis modules to rapidly construct a per-session, multi-domain, correlated analysis of user, service and network performance on-demand to speed problem identification and improve "time-to-knowledge."

ASI Technology's next generation intelligent metadata improves analysis capacity by reducing the amount of data required to analyze and reconstruct end-to-end user sessions. Intelligent data optimization techniques enable the efficient storage of virtual packet traces, reducing storage requirements by up to 50x, improving write-to-disk performance and speeding data retrieval by up to 10x. This dramatic reduction in storage requirements allows the nGenius InfiniStream appliance to store more data for much longer periods of time without compromising historical forensic analysis granularity.

Enhanced Business Value

ASI-based metrics are leveraged across the existing nGenius Service Assurance Solution analysis modules, including the nGenius Service Delivery Manager, nGenius Performance Manager and nGenius Subscriber Intelligence. Addressing the increasing volumes of user sessions and the growing number of transactions within a session, ASI scales analysis with more intelligent metadata that is highly representative of the user experience and service levels. Consequently, this enables faster identification of service quality and performance anomalies, allows for more effective triaging and improves the efficiency of diagnosis by analyzing all interrelated service delivery transactions from a unified solution with a single dataset. In addition, ASI technology will establish richer, more flexible service reporting capabilities with greater levels of business insight for more relevant and timely business intelligence.

End-to-End Visibility of Multi-Domain Cloud-based Services

As enterprise organizations look to leverage the value of cloud-based services for more scalable, elastic and efficient IT services, they will need to extend visibility beyond their own networks to understand the quality and performance of hosted applications and services. The emergence of "blended services" environments, where some elements of an IT service reside within the enterprise datacenter and some elements of the service reside within one or more cloud service providers' infrastructure, will make understanding the dynamics of service delivery and managing service levels and user experience extremely difficult. ASI technology addresses the challenges of managing service delivery across blended service environments by tracking user session transactions across multi-domain networks. As a result, ASI technology will allow cloud providers to more effectively manage the performance and service levels of hosted services within their datacenter, and support the delivery of secure and scalable tenant-specific metrics to their customers. Ultimately, this will enable the enterprise organization to achieve an unprecedented end-to-end view of service performance levels and the user experience across a highly complex, multi-domain service delivery environment.

"With ASI technology NetScout extends the business value of the nGenius solution to enable a more business-oriented view into user experiences across highly complex, multi-tier, multi-location environments," said Steven Shalita, vice president of marketing, NetScout. "This new innovation strengthens our technology leadership and will revolutionize the role of our unified service delivery management framework. ASI technology creates a closer linkage between service delivery management and business service levels by providing a richer and more dynamic view into user sessions enabling organizations to more effectively manage service delivery and protect the user experience."

Availability

The new Patent Pending ASI technology will be rolled out over the next 12-18 months in sequential releases supporting an increasing number of applications, protocols and services. The new technology will be supported in most deployed nGenius InfiniStream appliances and is added through simple in-place field software upgrades. All existing nGenius Service Assurance Solution modules will also leverage ASI-based metadata with synchronized sequential releases. Other new products that leverage ASI-based metrics are under development and will be announced as they become available. Please contact NetScout or a NetScout authorized reseller for more information.

About NetScout Systems, Inc.

NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT) is the market leader in Unified Service Delivery Management enabling comprehensive end-to-end network and application assurance. For over 26 years, NetScout has delivered breakthrough packet-flow technology that provides trusted and comprehensive real-time network and application performance intelligence enabling unified assurance of the network, applications and users. These solutions enable IT staff to predict, preempt and resolve network and service delivery problems while facilitating the optimization and capacity planning of the network infrastructure. NetScout nGenius(R) and Sniffer(R) solutions are deployed at more than 20,000 of the world's largest enterprises, government agencies, and more than 120 service providers, on over 740,000 network segments to assure the network, applications, and service delivery to their users and customers.

More information about NetScout is available at http://www.netscout.com.

NetScout, nGenius, InfiniStream and Sniffer are registered trademarks and Adaptive Session Intelligence is a trademark of NetScout Systems, Inc.

SOURCE: NetScout Systems, Inc.

NetScout Systems
Stephanie Xavier, 408-571-5343
Senior Public and Analyst Relations Manager
stephanie.xavier@netscout.com
or
Davies Murphy Group, Inc.
Rob Morton, 781-418-2460
netscout@daviesmurphy.com