Economy Got You Down? Getting More From Network & Application Monitoring Tools With Tight Budgets

INTRODUCTION With a down economy comes uncertainty, and that uncertainty is not limited to just your 401k.
Layoffs and budget cuts are being announced by the day.
At the keynote from the2008 Gartner Symposium ITexpo, Gartner CEO Gene Hall announced that the company had adjusted their 2009 IT budget expectations downward, from an estimated 3.
3% overall growth rate to a 2.
5% reduction.
Clearly, the economic situation is resonating, and executives are listening.
Gartner now recommends that the industry "use innovation to turn crisis into opportunity.
" The savvy technology strategist is already thinking about ways to do "more with less," searching for low or no cost solutions to existing problems.
Regardless, we are faced with the quandary of exactly how to do more with less when application performance and reliability, security enforcement, and other important objectives simply must be achieved.
GET MORE FROM YOUR MONITORING TOOLS Application Performance Management (APM) Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) Intrusion Detection/Prevention (IDP) Network Behavior Anomaly Detection (NBAD) Compliance Auditors Sniffers/Protocol Analyzers Data Recorders VoIP Analyzers THE PROBLEM With tighter budgets, organizations are being asked to do "more with less.
" At the same time, networks and applications continue to increase in complexity, and monitoring is critical for ensuring performance, reliability, and availability metrics are sustained.
Technology strategists are challenged to provide the appropriate monitoring coverage without the ability to purchase additional capital equipment.
On the other end of the spectrum, network operations management find themselves with a lack of staff to handle day-to-day activities.
Network operators spend a large amount of time troubleshooting, in excess of 75 days per year for nearly a quarter of network operators according to "State of the Network Global Survey," a research summary released in April, 2008.
Part of the issue lies in a lack of available SPAN ports and TAPs.
Troubleshooting tools must frequently be kept offline until a problem arises, and technical staff is forced to temporarily "make & break" connections when problems appear.
In summary, IT groups find themselves facing increasing complexity on the network, but with reduced financial and human resources to manage that complexity.
EXTEND YOUR TOOL COVERAGE WITH AGGREGATION Tool aggregation helps companies deploy multiple network tools by conveniently linking test and monitoring tools to any traffic on the network.
This improves network visibility and maximizes return on investment for monitoring tools.
Aggregation provides many benefits: oAggregate traffic so tools can monitor more of the network segments oFilter traffic so each tool gets only the data it needs, enabling it to operate at full efficiency oShare SPAN ports and TAPs so more tools can monitor different segments of the same traffic oUse 1GbE tools to monitor 10GbE links oUse 100MB tools to monitor 1GbE links oReduce costs for deploying, managing, and operating monitoring tools oIncrease efficiency for troubleshooting, resulting in productivity gains and faster MTTR If you want to get the most out of your network and application monitoring tools, consider the Anue 5200 Series Tool Aggregator.
This product was designed to address all of these issues.
By aggregating SPAN ports and TAPs to a centralized tool farm, all tools have access to the network traffic that each tool needs to perform its assigned task.
The Tool Aggregator enables you to aggregate, broadcast, and multicast network traffic to the right tools at full line rates.
It provides the ability to filter on a variety of Layer 2/3/4 parameters and protocols, offering significant control over load balancing and tool coverage.
The Tool Aggregator is very easy to use, with an intuitive GUI that provides simple, "drag 'n drop" control over all of these functions, without requiring command line coding or other cumbersome management techniques.
SUMMARY We can't control the economy or its current challenges, but we can control how we let it affect our businesses.
In these days where technology strategists are being asked to do "more with less," solutions like tool aggregation become even more important.
Sources for datapoints: Gartner website, "IT and the Economy" page, October, 2008 "Network Pros Spend Months on Troubleshooting," Shamus McGillicuddy, SearchNetworking.
com.
Referenced from "State of the Network Global Survey" research results, April, 2008.
Anue Systems Public Website: http://www.
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com/