Feb 08, 2012
Get Behind the Dashboard
Where did the dashboard originate? According to highly-believable but completely un-verified Internet resources, this mid-1800s invention was originally mounted on horse-drawn carriages and was designed to keep the mud, water, or other debris that flew up from the horses’ hooves off of the passengers. Go without a dashboard and you might be faced with an unpleasant surprise.
Fast forward to our generation and most of us know dashboards as those things in our cars...
Jan 31, 2012
Live simple. What a nice concept. Our lives in the technology industry, however, seem to be all about conquering the complicated rather than pursuing the simple.
Mobility, virtualization, more data, faster links, new applications and increasing vulnerability all require complex and sophisticated systems to manage and protect networks. Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure growth is increasing bandwidth requirements. Appliances are becoming more specialized so more are required. Connecting the...
Jan 23, 2012
Managing 10Gb Networks - Key Enabler for Managing "Big Data"
The need to manage "Big Data" is a major concern for many organizations in 2012, as companies seek to deploy a number of new technologies and approaches to address their business requirements. Some of these projects include:
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments
• Deployments of new applications and new application types
• The emergence of business video, both internally and in...
Oct 27, 2011
Visual Network Systems organized a Twitpoll over the last few weeks to get a vote on the worst application performance problem you have encountered. The votes are in! We will be posting a series of blogs to address the issues you have voted starting with the worst application performance problem.
50% of you voted that the worst problem is “We don’t know there is an application performance problem.”
Most of the IT customers and prospects I have talked to would like to know,...
Oct 27, 2011
Using a bucket to save yourself in a sinking boat, are you nuts?
If you’re in the middle of the ocean on a boat that’s sinking fast and all you have is a 10 gallon bucket there are two guarantees:
1.You will fill that bucket as fast and as furious as you possibly can to dump out the water
2. You will sink anyway. Its simple math applied to a very serious situation. A bucket that scoops up 10 gallons of water every 5 seconds can’t keep up with water entering through the hole at...
Oct 13, 2011
Correlated, mediated, and federated – these are the words that we in the IT performance management business use to describe the virtues of our respective solution architectures. We also use the term PMDB (Performance Management Database) in the same context. We proclaim these capabilities as providing unique business value to you, while at the same time assuming that you grasp their meaning and inherent implications.
Is this merely marketing propaganda, or are these truly important...
Sep 26, 2011
Visual Performance Manager v7.0 is released today to the world with a total makeover to improve end user experience. The focus of the end user experience improvement is about enhancing the workflow of application and network performance troubleshooting for the operations team.
Here is a scenario that you can relate to:
Operations receive a trouble ticket about a user at a branch office who is having problems with an application. To troubleshoot the problem, operations would need to determine...
Aug 22, 2011
Application performance and network performance are often misunderstood and misrepresented leading to dissatisfaction with monitoring systems and inability to reach actionable conclusions. I suspect that very few network engineers, service providers, or vendors really understand and appreciate the “when and why” around application and network performance.
For example, how would a business determine when to implement application performance analysis vs. network performance monitoring...
Jul 28, 2011
As I write this blog, the Cisco Live conference is in the rear view mirror. If you have ever been to a Cisco Live event you know that it is truly unique. This year 15,000 IT professionals attended in person, while an additional 40,000 attended virtually. In addition, two hundred of Cisco’s partners participated in a trade show.
In normal times, one of my favorite parts of any Cisco Live conference is listening to John Chambers. But these are not normal times. In the last few months Cisco...
Jul 21, 2011
Recently, I had the pleasure of working with a large retail banking customer that had undertaken what they initially described as, “Mission Impossible.” Their mission was to gain visibility into key financial applications, get a better understanding of application components and dependencies, build baselines of network and application performance, create custom dashboard views for a number of different users in a variety of roles, and provide overall improvements in Service Kwality...
