sdxcentral network performance management takes on applications report 2016 a

7/25/2019 SDxCentral Network Performance Management Takes on Applications Report 2016 A

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Market Report

The Trusted News and Resource Site for SDx, SDN, NFV, Cloud and Virtualization Infrastructure

Special Report: Network

Performance Management

Takes On Applications

How the Future of Performance Management

Integrates Network Monitoring, Analytics,

Application Intelligence


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2016 SDNCentral LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page i

Market Report | Network Performance Management Takes On Applications

contents

Table of Contents

Intro: A New Era for APM and NPM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Application Performance Management Trends in the Cloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Performance Analytics Drive the New User Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Market Trends Converging Performance Management Platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Performance Management Products and the Road to Convergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Featured Performance Management Products

CA Technologies: CA Virtual Network Assurance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Juniper Networks, Inc.: Contrail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Pluribus Networks: VCF Insight Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Network Testing and Network Performance Management

Accedian Networks Inc.: SkyLIGHT VCX Controller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Arista Networks: Aristas CloudVision Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Big Switch Networks: Big Monitoring Fabric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Gigamon: Unified Visibility Fabric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Kentik: Kentik Detect. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Netmon: Netmon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

NIKSUN: NIKSUN NetVCR Suite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Polystar: Polystar OSIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Qosmos: Qosmos ixEngine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Rocana: Rocana Ops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

SolarWinds: SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Spirent: Spirent TestCenter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Zoho: WebNMS Symphony Orchestration Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Cloud and Application Performance Management

AppDynamics: Application Intelligence Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Astellia: Nova Explorer, Nova Alerter, Nova Performance Analytics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

BigPanda: BigPanda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

BMC: TrueSight App Visibility Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Datadog: Datadog Cloud Scale Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Dell: Dell Foglight Performance Monitoring. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

IBM: IBM Application Performance Management APM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Idera: Uptime Infrastructure Monitor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Microsoft Corporation: Microsoft Operations Management Suite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Nagios: Nagios XI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

New Relic: New Relic APM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Oracle: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Radware: Radware Alteon Virtual Appliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Riverbed Technologies: Riverbed SteelCentral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Sinefa: Network Visibility and Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Splunk: Splunk Cloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38


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contents

Integrated NPM and APM

Brocade: Brocade Network Visibility Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Cisco Systems: Cisco Nexus Data Broker & Cisco Prime Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Corvil: Corvil Solution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40

Dynatrace: Dynatrace Digital Performance Platform. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

EXFO: EXFO Worx . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

ExtraHop: ExtraHop Platform. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Hewlett Packard Enterprise: HPE AppPulse Suite & HPE Network Node Manager i . . . . . . . . . . 42

InfoVista: VistaInsight and 5View. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

InMon Corp.: sFlow-RT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Ixia: Hawkeye. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

LiveAction: LiveNX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44

LogicMonitor: LogicMonitor Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

NetScout Systems Inc.: nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Nokia: VitalSuite Performance Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Viavi Solutions: Viavi Performance Management Solution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46


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VCF Insight Analytics is

a monitoring solution

intended to replace

the most common

deployment of packet

brokers and analysis

tools. It provides an

inexpensive means to

monitor and track the

performance of business

application flows of

information, and can

be used with or

without existing

Pluribus Networks

based switching fabrics.

pluribusnetworks.com/network-performance-monitoring
http://www.juniper.net/http://www.juniper.net/http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/products/network-performance-monitoring/http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/products/network-performance-monitoring/http://www.juniper.net/


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http://www.opencontrail.org/http://www.juniper.net/us/en/


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What matters to them is areliable digital experience.Next-generation networks demand next-generation assurance

CA Virtual Network Assurance

SDN/NFV performance and fault management.Learn more atca.com/vna
http://www.ca.com/us/products/ca-virtual-network-assurance.htmlhttp://www.ca.com/us/products/ca-virtual-network-assurance.htmlhttp://www.nuagenetworks.net/security-out-front


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2016 SDNCentral LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page

market summary


Intro: A New Era for APM and NPM

The landscape for application performance management (APM) and network performance management (NPM)

has changed enormously over the last few years, driven largely by changing infrastructure and application

architectures.

The industry as a whole, including enterprises, service providers and vendors, is grappling with difficult

performance management issues. How do you monitor, analyze and optimize the behavior of highly distributed,

virtualized, cloud-based systems built of ever smaller components such as containers and micro-services?

In this report, SDxCentral examines the trends that are re-shaping the APM and NPM markets and driving the

need for integrated APM/NPM solutions.

Trends Impacting APM and NPM Solutions

A variety of trends are driving the APM and NPM markets to converge. Key trends highlighted in this report

include:

Adoption of hybrid data center architectures and cloud-based services and applications is driving the need

for cloud support in APM/NPM tools, including end-to-end views of application transactions Strong uptake of SDN and NFV to automate provisioning is driving the need for performance management to

follow

Relentless growth in network traffic, fueled by video, Internet of Things and other applications is driving the

need for scalable tools that can collect and analyze very high volumes of application and network traffic and

performance data

Rise of the consumer user is driving the need for transaction-oriented end-user experience metrics

New software development approaches such as DevOps and containers is driving the need for closed-loop

monitoring and visibility into application components and their interdependenciesAn introduction to SDx

infrastructure security

APM and NPM Convergence

Todays applications and networks are deeply intertwined. Those interdependenciesand their rapid rate of

change--are driving the need for a more holistic approach to performance management. Network and appli-

cation metrics must both be factored into measuring application performance and end user experience if CIOs

are to gain a quantitative understanding of whether their applications meet business objectives.

A key challenge for the industry is the need to instrument, collect and manage large volumes of monitoring

data, including complex interdependencies among application components, infrastructure, LAN, WAN and

cloud environments. While many enterprises and service providers are successfully using SDN and NFV for

automation, the industry has only begun to address the need for performance monitoring and management of

these deployments.

Vendors efforts to deliver a suite of converged APM/NPM products has spurred considerable consolidation

along with new product classes and descriptions such as application-aware NPM and application-aware infra-structure performance management.

User Feedback on APM/NPM Market

SDxCentral conducted a survey asking the community to weigh in on the APM and NPM markets. Of the 79

respondents to the APM-NPM survey, 37% were technology vendors; 24% telecommunications service

providers; 19% enterprise end-users; 9% were cloud service providers; and 11% other. Figures in this report sort

these results into two groups of respondents: technology vendors and end-users/customers (which includes

enterprises, telecommunications service providers and cloud service providers).


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2016 SDNCentral LLC. All Rights Reserved. Page 3

market summary


When asked to rank the principle benefits of APM and NPM technologies, respondents identified improved

visibility and simplified operations as the biggest value (42% for APM, 48% for NPM). For APM, respondents also

cited improved user experiences and customer satisfaction (42%), and for NPM solutions cited enhanced

productivity from improved network performance (40%).

sdxcentral.com

PRINCIPLE BENEFITS OF APM TECHNOLOGY

42%

24%

18%

41%

42%

59%

17%

28%

17%

14%

18%

10%

10%

7%

20%

14%

Improved Visibility andSimplified Operations, with a

Single Pane of Glass

Enhanced Productivityfrom Improved Application

Performance

Business Growth Enablement

Better User Experience andCustomer Satisfaction

Cost Control Due toBetter Use of Resources

Improved Network and IT Planning,with the Ability to Determine where

to Reconfigure / Recode

Improved ApplicationManagement

Ability to Trace TransactionsAcross Distributed Applications

Competitive Differentiation

6%

10%

End Users

Vendors

Respondents could choose their top two principle benefits.

0 30%15% 45% 60%


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market summary


sdxcentral.com

PRINCIPLE BENEFITS OF NPM TECHNOLOGY

48%

41%

20%

31%

40%

28%

10%

38%

41%

6%

8%

4%

10%

7%

32%

31%

Improved Visibility andSimplified Operations, with a

Single Pane of Glass

Cost Control Due to Better

Use of Resources

Enhanced Productivityfrom Improved Network

Performance

Business Growth Enablement

Improved Network and IT Planning,with the Ability to Determine where

to Reconfigure / Recode

Competitive Differentiation

Better User Experience/Customer Satisfaction

Improved ApplicationManagement

End Users

Vendors

Respondents could choose their top two principle benefits.

0 20%10% 30% 50%40%


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market summary


Despite recognizing the benefits of performance management, the majority of those surveyed said current APM

and NPM tools are not meeting their needs. The complexity and cost of these solutions are major challenges for

customers. Gaps in coverage and lack of integration with SDN/NFV are the next biggest pain points.

Given the current performance management challenges, interest in integrated solutions is highfavored by 92%

of customer respondents.

sdxcentral.com

BIGGEST CHALLENGES WITH APM & NPM SOLUTIONS

75%

50%

25%

0

Complexity

64%

Costs

54%

Gaps inCoverage

30%

Lack ofIntegration with

SDN/NFV

Capabilities

30%

Lack ofIntegration with

Container

Technologies

14%

Lack ofSecurity

Features

8%

Respondents could choose their top 3 challenges. Results from 50 end users surveyed.


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market summary


Application Performance Management Trends in the Cloud

A variety of technology initiatives and trends are driving the need for a new, integrated approach to APM and

NPM. We highlight the key trends here.

Adoption of Cloud ArchitecturesCloud architectures are increasingly popular for the data center, especially hybrid clouds that combine

on-premises resources with public cloud-based services. A recent survey conducted by IDG Research Services

found that 83% of respondents currently use or plan to use a hybrid cloud environment.1

On the plus side, hybrid clouds let enterprises instantly expand resources or spin up a new application, often at

considerable savings compared to in-house deployments. However, use of public cloud services makes

end-to-end performance management a challenge since IT staff often have little to no visibility into traffic in the

cloud, nor can they control it. The lack of end-to-end visibility across public cloud and on-premises

infrastructure is one of the key challenges to deploying hybrid clouds.

Another challenge is that clouds, by their nature, are highly dynamic. Cloud management software can provision

entire application systems automatically, while deployment tools like Puppet can update thousands of virtual

machines simultaneously. Monitoring this dynamic resource usage and tracking the various network paths

present in hybrid environments is difficult, making it hard to diagnose application performance issues.

Uptake of SDN and NFV

Adoption of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies are

contributing to the need for new performance management solutions. Many enterprises and service providers

are already using SDN in their data centers to automate provisioning, benefiting from lower operational

overhead and the ability to respond dynamically to business and application demands. Similarly, by separating

network functions into discrete elements that can be activated and managed in software, NFV makes the IT

infrastructure more flexible and scalable.

However, making resources and services immediately available presents performance management challenges.

For example, traditional network management tools only run discovery operations periodically, creatingsignificant visibility gaps in SDN and NFV deployments. Automating changes or instantiating user-demanded

services without knowing whether the network can fulfill these requests is risky, as they could be provisioned

over paths that are near the saturation point. Likewise, changes to one component in an SDN or NFV

environment can affect many other components; performance management tools need to provide visibility into

these interdependencies.

Impact of Network Traffic Trends

Changes in the volume, type and duration of network traffic are also having an impact on the type of

performance management tools needed. Traffic volumes continue to climb. Video traffic, in particular, is

escalating, both for consumer and business use (Netflix and YouTube now account for over half of all broadband

traffic during peak hours). Uptake of VoIP, graphics-heavy social media sites and applications such as Snapchat

and Instagram, as well as peer-to-peer file sharing are also contributing to rising traffic volumes.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices as diverse as store kiosks and smart watches are also adding to network traffic

loads. Its estimated that the number of IoT devices could reach as high as 50 billion nodes in 2020, driven by

both commercial and consumer use cases.

1Source: http://apmdigest.com/application-performance-hybrid-cloud-1
http://apmdigest.com/application-performance-hybrid-cloud-1http://apmdigest.com/application-performance-hybrid-cloud-1http://apmdigest.com/application-performance-hybrid-cloud-1http://apmdigest.com/application-performance-hybrid-cloud-1


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market summary


End User Expectations

In the era of the consumer user, employees, end customers and other users have come to expect anywhere,

anytime access to content and applications with performance equivalent to a wired connection (or, put another

way, I want it now!). Research shows that just a one-second increase in page response time can decrease page

views by 11%, cut customer satisfaction by 16%, and decrease revenue by 7%.2

Applications Trends

In contrast to yesterdays monolithic applications, today's apps are built with reusable components and are

highly distributed, often with components spread across on-premises data centers and public clouds.

Development approaches such as DevOps allow IT to build, test and deploy applications much faster than in the

past, so the pace of application development and deployment is accelerating. Container software systems such

as Docker are being used to create large platforms for distributed apps, as well as to develop microservices,

which execute in containers. Some containers address each others workloads through API calls, while other

container systems rely on network functionality to connect their distributed parts.

Many organizations are now managing application ecosystems composed of hundreds or thousands of

foundational elements, with transactions executing across heterogeneous software platforms, networks,

databases, and legacy technologies. As enterprise applications become more componentized and networked,

an understanding of the relationships and dependencies between infrastructure and application elements has

become critical to performance management.

Performance Analytics Drive the New User Experience

Given the critical role applications play in business success, a key goal for enterprises and service providers is to

ensure the best possible application performance. Poor performance can originate in the network, servers,

application logic, database or other areas. Trying to pinpoint the cause is increasingly difficult since applications

change rapidly and now run on a highly dynamic, automated and increasingly virtualized infrastructure thats

often distributed across on-premises and public cloud infrastructure.

Traditionally, APM and NPM tools have provided views of individual aspects of service delivery, such as network,

systems and storage. But today application and network performance have become more intertwined than ever.

Its no longer sufficient simply to monitor discrete network elements, such as CPU/memory utilization, device

pooling, packet loss and jitter, and to infer application performance from resource utilization. In addition, the

dynamic nature of todays virtualized infrastructure means IT can no longer count on a static topology as a

source of monitoring data.

When asked about the top functions theyre looking for in APM/NPM solutions, the majority of customers (52%)

that responded to SDxCentrals survey cited the ability to monitor cloud services across public, private and

hybrid environments. The next most sought after functions include application performance monitoring (44%),

real-time application monitoring (36%), SDN controller integration (36%), and deep packet inspection (32%).

And, as noted earlier, more than 90% want an integrated APM/NPM solution.

2Source: Riverbed - The Aberdeen Group


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market summary


sdxcentral.com

TOP FUNCTIONS CUSTOMERS ARE LOOKING FOR IN APM/NPM SOLUTIONS

52%38%

24%

34%

44%

48%

22%

21%

12%

3%

36%

59%

20%

24%

10%

7%

36%

28%

18%

7%

10%

3%

32%

31%

18%

10%

10%

17%

32%

41%

16%

17%

8%

7%

Cloud Services Monitoringacross Public, Private, and

Hybrid Environments

Real-time ApplicationMonitoring

Mobile Device Monitoring

SLA Monitoring

Code-level Monitoring

Application PerformanceMonitoring

Response-time Analysis(network)

Deep Packet Inspection(DPI)

Controller Integration

Real-time Network Monitoring

Transaction Analytics AcrossDistributed Applications

Traffic Analytics

Database Diagnostics

SDN Controller Integration

User Analytics

Response-time Analysis(applications)

Protocol-level Analysis

End Users

Vendors

Respondents could choose their top four functions

0 30%15% 45% 60%


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market summary


Below we highlight some of the key requirements for modern performance management solutions.

Cloud Considerations

Managing performance across hybrid and public cloud-based applications is a major challenge. Monitoring

traditional APM metrics, such as server availability, arent always useful in the cloud. For example, servers/VMs

come and go so monitoring server availability wont tell you much about the performance of an application as a

whole.

Rather, the focus has shifted to the user transaction and its response time, which requires end-to-end visibility

across on-premises infrastructure and public cloud infrastructure. Among the capabilities that a converged

APM/NPM solution needs to support cloud-based applications and services are the ability to:

Discover and map each applications topology across the relevant data centers/clouds

Consume and analyze metrics from API gateways, messaging platforms, and other integration points

Provide visibility into performance across application tiers

Optimize workloads through established policies

Support application agents that can initiate a connection (call home) to the management system.

The last item is a big change. Legacy performance management systems typically rely on remote procedure

calls from the management system to the monitors and other data collectors. However, this pull approach

wont work in the cloud because its not necessarily possible to open an inbound port into cloud-based

applications.

End User Experience Todays 99.999

Applications are essential for business success. For many enterprises and service providers, end user experience

(EUE) has become the metric by which applicationand therefore business--performance is measured. A

whopping 95% of line of business respondents to an IDC survey3 said that maintaining a positive user

experience for business-critical applications is very important, and 85% said not doing so has a strong negative

impact on the business.

A key issue facing many enterprises is the need to track the performance of every type of application they

support, including commercial applications such as SAP, Oracle Financial and Microsoft Exchange; custom-built

apps; web-enabled apps; and mobile apps. Many traditional APM tools focus only on custom-built applications;

however, IT needs a performance management solution that can provide end-to-end visibility into all application

types and transactions running across hybrid environments, and discover all application dependencies no

matter where they are located.

The complexity of modern applications also presents a serious challenge to managing service delivery. Theres

a growing consensus that the best way to measure EUE from an application perspective is to measure the

response time and throughput of every application in production, rather than focus on resource utilization, such

as CPU and memory use. Similarly, the key metric for network performance is end-to-end latency, not simply

the bandwidth utilization and response time of individual network devices.

From a product standpoint, EUE management requires a unified APM/NPM architecture that can do the

following:

Provide visibility into how system and network resources are serving all applications.

3Source: https://www.appdynamics.com/press-release/

idc-releases-first-ever-devops-and-application-performance-survey/
https://www.appdynamics.com/press-release/idc-releases-first-ever-devops-and-application-performance-survey/https://www.appdynamics.com/press-release/idc-releases-first-ever-devops-and-application-performance-survey/https://www.appdynamics.com/press-release/idc-releases-first-ever-devops-and-application-performance-survey/https://www.appdynamics.com/press-release/idc-releases-first-ever-devops-and-application-performance-survey/https://www.appdynamics.com/press-release/idc-releases-first-ever-devops-and-application-performance-survey/https://www.appdynamics.com/press-release/idc-releases-first-ever-devops-and-application-performance-survey/


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market summary


Represents the relationships between application components and network components, including visibility

into real-time communication between the different application tiers.

Correlates network and application performance data in real time.

The Data Deluge and Need for High-Volume Data Analytics

Given the dynamic, transient nature of the IT infrastructure and the explosion of inter-dependencies among

application and infrastructure components, its become clear that application and network monitoring must be

done with much greater fidelity and frequency. That means collecting and analyzing much more data than ever

before.

Below are some of the key characteristics that need to be included to provide comprehensive APM and NPM.

The Type of Monitoring Data Collected

Gartner recommends taking a data-centric approach to monitoring and combining input from multiple sources4,

such as: log files for infrastructure and applications; API data, which includes utilization metrics gathered from

APIs built into components; wire data extracted from packets and flows across networks; intra-code

instrumentation data gathered by instrumentation inserted into apps and infrastructure elements; and synthetic

data, such as that derived from simulating business transactions. Gartner analysts recommend that operators

focus on these data sources and treat topology information, CMDB schema and other static, domain-specific

models as secondary, heuristic devices.

Wire data is created by reassembling network data into full streams and providing payload analysis and full

context in real time. Thats why wire data is an especially good source of accurate information about behavior

events across the entire IT infrastructure and application portfolio. In fact, because packet header information in

wire data can provide direct observations of end-user experience, analysts believe that wire data5will play a

primary role in availability and performance analysis.

4Source: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-317QJV4&ct=160316&st=sb5Source: http://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacency
https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-317QJV4&ct=160316&st=sbhttp://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacency/https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-317QJV4&ct=160316&st=sbhttp://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacencyhttp://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacencyhttps://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-317QJV4&ct=160316&st=sbhttp://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacency/https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-317QJV4&ct=160316&st=sb


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market summary


Respondents could choose their top three important protocols. Results from 50 end users surveyed.

sdxcentral.com

NETWORK PROTOCOLS BY IMPORTANCE

Netflow76%

SNMP44%

TWAMP2%

Jflow6%

Telnet/CLI vendor-specific format10%

Y.1731, 802.3ag12%

SSH vendor-specific format20%

IPFIX26%

Syslog vendor-specific format30%

IP SLA40%

sFlow30%

0 20% 60% 80%40%

Wire data is also used to understand inter-tier transaction performance. The graph below illustrates the

protocols that SDxCentral survey respondents consider most important to monitor.

Howand How FrequentlyData is Collected: Scalability Challenges

Collecting performance data at scale with the necessary frequency and volume is driving the need for very

high-performance monitoring solutions. On the network side, for example, technologies such as packet sniffers,

flow analyzers, deep-packet inspection, and network probes must evolve to keep pace with multi-gigabit

network speeds. Some vendors have responded by introducing monitoring fabrics.

Monitoring must be done much more frequently than before, with data collection occurring in the 5 to 15 second

range to avoid missing important events in the dynamic infrastructure. Increasing the frequency of monitoring

also increases the volume of data collected and in need of analysis.

In addition, many industry players see a need for agents, collectors, and other entities that forward monitoring

data to use phone home techniques to communicate to the back-end management system. Part of the

problem is that traditional polling methods cant support the sheer volume of data that needs to be collected;

the polling traffic itself could cause bottlenecks.


18/53


market summary


Some vendors as well as the Principal Architect and Manager of Googles Network Architecture team6have

expressed the need for telemetry in network devices that can push status information to management

systems rather than the management system periodically polling those devices. Currently, the SNMP agent on a

device will only push messages, or traps, to the management system when a threshold, such as CPU or

bandwidth utilization, is crossed.

Storing and Analyzing All that Data: More Scalability ChallengesA converged performance management solution will need to be supported by an underlying data architecture

that can cope with the arrival rate and quantity of management data collected. Having a common data store is

key to enabling data sharing by different performance management tools, whether these are from a single

vendor or best-of-breed solutions from different vendors.

Once collected, the data needs to be analyzed and presented. Again, scalability is an issue as the amount of

data that needs to be analyzed is quite large. The industry is looking to self-learning analytics and other

methods to handle combing through these volumes of data and performing functions such as statistical

analysis, machine-learning-assisted pattern discovery, anomaly detection, causal analysis and data visualization.

APM/NPM and the Capability to Leverage SDN/NFV

Both SDN and NFV environments need real-time monitoring and analytics so the network software itself can

factor performance into the provisioning process. For example, if a given link is performing poorly, an SDN

network with performance intelligence can route around it. Likewise, changes to one component in an SDN or

NFV environment can affect many other components, so operators need visibility into these interdependencies.

In the NFV market, the trend is toward the creation of microservices, which will be connected to one another via

network virtualization, creating even more interdependencies.

In SDN and NFV environments, performance management tools need to provide granular visibility into changes

occurring in these environments as well as highly scalable relationship analytics to support the many

interdependencies.

Flexible Deployment Options

Customers want business-oriented performance metrics that can be used by multiple stakeholder groups. They

also want less complex management interfaces with more sophisticated visualization and drill-down capabilities.

Customers are also looking for a flexible delivery model that lets them choose to deploy APM/NPM tools in any

combination of on-premises, SaaS, or hybrid implementations, based on their existing platform and business

model.

Use of SDN/NFV and White Box Technologies in Performance Monitoring

Start-ups in the SDN/NFV space have introduced new tools that are less dependent on proprietary hardware and

that leverage commodity silicon from vendors like Broadcom. These new breed of solutions, coupled with SDN

technologies and Big Data analytics create novel approaches that provide improved visibility of both networks

and applications at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional solutions. Companies like Big Switch

Networks and Pluribus Networks are pushing the boundaries of monitoring and coupling application awarenesswith network telemetry, allowing them to make inroads against more entrenched vendors like Cisco, CA

Technologies as well as IXIA, NetScout and Gigamon.

6Source: http://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacency
http://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacency/http://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacencyhttp://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacencyhttp://www.packetdesign.com/blog/we-dont-have-the-luxury-of-end-to-end-complacency/


19/53


market summary


Summary of User Requirements for Converged APM/NPM Solutions

Supports cloud architectures

Collects a variety of data types (log, API, wire, etc.) at very frequent intervals (5-15 seconds)

Provides application delivery/user-experience monitoring both end-to-end and at the component level

Network monitoring able to scale to 40 or 100 Gbps and handle encrypted traffic at line rate

Highly scalable, including efficient storage and handling of terabytes and petabytes of application and

network traffic and performance data

Provides visibility into and performance management of SDN and NFV environments

Tracks, correlates and provides end-to-end visibility into complex application component interdependencies

Tracks, correlates and provides end-to-end visibility into complex application, infrastructure and network

relationships and interdependencies

Supports a variety of monitoring architectures to accommodate different business goals.

Integrates with DevOps environments for closed-loop monitoring and provides visibility into container-based

applications

Ease of use based on automated, rather than manual, configuration and tagging

Is programmable, allowing customer to extend the platform or tools functionality

Market Trends Converging Performance Management Platforms

In todays cloud-based, virtualized IT infrastructure, applications and networks are deeply intertwined. These

interdependencies are driving the need for a more holistic approach to performance management.

Consequently, vendor approaches to performance management are shifting, spawning new sets of tool sets

that combine APM and NPM functionality in order to provide an accurate picture of end-user experience and

performance across the entire application delivery environment.

Understandably, a lot is in flux. Traditional APM and NPM vendors are trying to expand the reach of their

product portfolios, new players continue to enter the market, and new terms have emerged for converged

solutions, including: application-aware NPM; network-aware APM; and application-aware infrastructure

performance management (AA-IPM). Vendors are busy both buying and building out their solutions, and market

consolidation continues apace. Here we highlight key trends in the market.

Consolidation Continues

Consolidation is likely to continue in the APM/NPM market as vendors seek to buy key capabilities to round out

their product lines. For example, both Microsoft and BMC Software beefed up their AA-IPM chops last year,

buying up BlueStripe Software and Boundary Networks, respectively. For its part InfoVista, a CSP and

large-enterprise-focused NPM provider, acquired Ipanema Technologies as a means to expand its APM

capabilities, particularly for VoIP and UC.

(Interestingly, BMC was acquired by a private investor group in 2013, and InfoVista is owned by a private equity

firm that also has major stakes in Dynatrace and Riverbed Technology.)

Microsoft is integrating BlueStripes application management technology into its own management products

and services, including System Center and Operations Management Suite (OMS). This technology includes an

OS-based agent that watches the traffic flow between the OS and everything it talks to, down to the transaction

level; discovers the topology of the applications running on each server; maps applications and their

dependencies; calculates an end-to-end and hop-by-hop response-time metric for each application; and

pinpoints problems, helping maintain SLAs across complex underlying infrastructure. The agent was designed


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market summary


to support applications running on Windows, Linux, AIX, and Solaris OS.

BMC has a range of IT operations management products as well as APM offerings, including TrueSight

Operations Management and the TrueSight App Visibility Manager, which provides application server and EUE

monitoring. With its purchase of Boundary, BMC added a SaaS-based AA-IPM solution, dubbed TrueSight Pulse,

to its mix. TrueSight Pulse provides visibility into cloud and server infrastructure using real-time telemetry andphone home capabilities to monitor metrics from web applications and the underlying cloud and on-premises

infrastructure. Its support for Amazon Web Service (AWS) includes discovery of all AWS services and resources;

real-time data collection and display; and predefined alarm settings for key metric values.

Architectural Approaches to Converged APM/NPM

Theres strong demand among enterprises and service providers for open performance management solutions

that support a collection of best-of-breed tools. Many would like to see the DevOps model used to create

bundles of open and interoperable APM/NPM tools that can analyze a variety of performance data sources. The

majority (60%) of customers who responded SDxCentrals survey indicated they want APM/ NPM solutions

delivered as virtual network functions (VNFs).

Here are two approaches vendors are taking to unify APM and NPM in a converged solution.

The Integrated Platform Approach

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, CA Technologies and BMC are among the vendors offering perfor-

mance management platforms designed to unify application, network and infrastructure performance

management by integrating disparate data sets, tools, reporting, etc. While platform vendors sell suites of their

own tools for their platforms, some also support an ecosystem of third-party products.

A Common Big Data Back End

With this approach, each ecosystem partner puts their unique data and its schema into a common data store

and makes it available to every other vendor in the ecosystem. Currently, cooperating APM/NPM vendors are

reusing each others data through common big data back ends such as Splunk and OpsDataStore.

Splunk is the leading big data back end. It has an established ecosystem of partners that take advantage of the

large variety of log and other monitoring data Splunk collects and stores. Similarly, start-up OpsDataStore

launched its data back end with an ecosystem of partners including AppDynamics, Dynatrace, ExtraHop, Qlik,

and Tableau. For example, through OpsDataStore, detailed wire data from Extrahop is available for use by

Dynatrace and AppDynamics APM suites.

With these building blocks, sophisticated IT shops can create their own converged tools for APM, NPM, infra-

structure performance management, operations and cloud management.

Tackling Performance Management in SDN and NFV Environments

The industry has made progress in addressing the performance management challenges that SDN and NFV

present, including key standards work, which is imperative given the roles of these technologies in todays IT

infrastructure.

For example, close work between the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) andOpen Networking Foundation (ONF) has spurred the development of an open source implementation focused

on automating unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) quality of experience (QoE). This solution is

designed to combine network element information with UC&C session metrics in real-time to provide visibility

into an automated problem resolution for voice, video and desktop-sharing sessions in-flight or any period

thereafter.

While this is just one use case, it demonstrates how SDN can be used to automatically program dynamic QoS

policies across the network on a per session basis. Its also significant because the focus is on the end point,


21/53


market summary


enabling an end user, real-time media application to communicate the bandwidth and traffic treatment it needs,

which the network then automatically provisions. At the same time, this solution provides visibility needed for

root cause analysis of UC&C quality issues, and automates problem resolution without requiring dedicated

probes, synthetics, etc.

The NFV camp has also been busy. For example, the Management and Orchestration (MANO) Working Groupof the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has defined an architecture for the

management and orchestration of all resources in the cloud data center, including computing, networking,

storage, and virtual machine resources. One of the key components of the NFV management and orchestration

(NFV MANO) architecture is the virtual infrastructure manager (VIM).

The VIM coordinates the physical resources necessary to deliver network services, which includes: managing

compute, storage, network and other hardware resources as well as software resources such as hypervisors;

discovery of their capabilities and features; maintaining an inventory of the allocation of virtual resources to

physical resources; and orchestrating and optimizing the allocation, upgrade, release, and reclamation of NFV

resources.

Many vendors offer VIMs. In addition, OpenStack is often deployed as a VIM: It controls pools of compute,

storage, and networking resources that can be managed through OpenStack API. Many vendors have createdOpenStack implementations of their own, including Red Hat, Mirantis, Oracle and VMware. Other vendors

supply VIM solutions as well as add-ons to OpenStack.

In addition to these industry efforts, some vendors support SDN and NFV within their performance

management tools. For example, CA Technologies supports SDN and NFV in its CA Virtual Network Assurance

gateway, which provides visibility into the multi-layered SDN/NFV stack and its physical network relationships.

HPE offers several SDN and NFV-related management tools, including the IMC Virtual Application Networks

(VAN) Software Defined Network (SDN) Manager Software, which provides monitoring, fault, configuration,

accounting and security for SDN environments. Similarly, the HPE NFV Director includes monitoring and perfor-

mance-related capabilities, including monitoring each VNF component; correlating the physical infrastructure

view into VNF-specific virtual infrastructure views; and proving views of network services, including correlating

all virtual and physical network functions that are part of a service.

Companies with Both NPM and APM Angles

While many companies are working on converged performance management tools, three companies stand out

for making it into both the APM and NPM Gartner Magic Quadrant reports.

CA Technologies CA Technologies offers a suite of performance management products, a cloud management

platform, SDN/NFV and other solutions. CA has an extensive NPM tool set, including network analytics, visibility

and management. Its APM offerings include: analytics and reporting of EUE information; mobile device

monitoring; monitoring support for microservices and Docker containers; and API gateway support for

management of API-connected services. The company aims to provide insight into the services and

components underlying an application and how change might impact its performance.

A key part of CA's strategy is to provide a unified architecture, including a single user interface and reportingsystem, via its CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) solution. The company also has several cloud

offerings. CA UIM for Amazon Web Services lets customers monitor the availability and performance of AWS

EC2 and S3 systems. CA UIM interacts with the Amazon CloudWatch Web service and gathers resource

utilization metrics such as CPU, disk, network and memory, and has a CloudWatcher function that lets

customers view and manage cloud instances and associated CloudWatch services.

HPE A key component of HPEs management portfolio is its Intelligent Management Center (IMC) platform,

which supports a variety of modular tools including APM, network traffic analysis, service health manager, user

behavior and SDN management.


22/53


market summary


HPE offers an array of application monitoring and performance management tools for desktop, web and mobile

apps that support on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. The companys APM products are available in

any combination of on-premises, SaaS or hybrid implementations.

HPEs APM solutions support business transaction monitoring, providing visibility into process flows over the

entire application and infrastructure environment. HPEs Real User Monitoring (RUM) addresses EUE bymonitoring the performance and availability of application services and allowing IT to trace user experience

across tiers, capture live sessions, see where customers clicked, measure response times, and see pages that

caused problems. RUM supports more than 20 application protocols and applications such as SAP, Citrix and

native mobile application monitoring on Android. It also includes a software development kit for building

custom integrations to capture user experience in specific applications, such as for the banking and telecom

industries.

HPE has a long history providing enterprise network monitoring tools and has a substantial NPM portfolio and

customer base. For example, HPEs RUM and Network Node Manager i provide deep packet inspection that,

coupled with the IMC platforms extensive device support, provide end-to-end management for the entire

network and operation cycle.

Riverbed Technology Riverbed is better known for the technical breadth and depth of its NPM products but

also has a robust APM offering.

A key component of Riverbeds converged solution is the SteelCentral Portal, a console that integrates data

from SteelCentral and SteelHead products to provide visibility into and control over end-user experience,

application performance and network performance across hybrid environments. The SteelCentral Portal

supports a suite of performance-related tools, including: NetSensor for infrastructure component monitoring;

NetProfiler for network reporting and analytics, including core protocol and flow analysis; AppInternals for EUE

monitoring and transaction tracing; and AppResponse for fixing performance problems.

On the NPM side, the companys SteelHead product family is focused on WAN optimization and improving

service levels for applications across data centers, branch locations, cloud networks, and end users. The

SteelHead SaaS module is designed to boost the performance of SaaS applications, including Microsoft Office365 and Salesforce.com. Riverbed also supports open APIs and development tools, called SteelScript, that

allow software developers to write applications that communicate with other systems and services within the

Riverbed ecosystem.

APM and NPM Leaders

Within the APM market, AppDynamics, Dynatrace and New Relic maintain leading positions, while Cisco and

NetScout dominate the NPM market. These companies hold leadership spots in their respective areas, but all are

fleshing out their tool kits and addressing key challenges customers face, from cloud integration to transaction

times/EUE monitoring across diverse infrastructure.

AppDynamicsfocuses on providing real-time insights into application performance, user experience, and

business outcomes, and has made the business transaction its primary unit of management for software

applications. The company offers an application-centric unified monitoring platform designed to monitor end

user, application, database and infrastructure for end-to-end visibility into business transactions.

Dynatracealso focuses on giving customers the ability to trace individual transactions, from inception in a

users browser through the entire application system. The companys suite of APM products provide application

as well as user monitoring, and include both on-premises and SaaS components.

Dynatraces Ruxit product combines website and application performance monitoring and includes application

monitoring down to the code-level; server monitoring, including CPU, memory, and network health metrics


23/53


market summary


down to the process level; network monitoring that reveals the quality of all process connections, including

processes distributed across virtualized cloud environments and data centers; and EUE monitoring, which

captures metrics from web browsers. Ruxit also monitors private as well as public cloud deployments, including

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack environments.

New Relic delivers purely SaaS-based APM functionality. This approach has become popular with small tomid-size enterprises for its simplicity. After installing the New Relic agent in applications, customers log onto a

web console that points to the cloud-based back end, dubbed the Software Analytics Cloud. Via this back end,

customers get a single point of analysis for application performance, EUE and business outcomes.

New Relics suite of APM tools encompass application, server, browser, mobile and synthetic monitoring. The

company supports a range of cloud environments and tools, including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web

Services. For example, New Relics Azure agent, which is available directly from the Microsoft Azure

Marketplace, provides performance dashboards as a live frame within the Azure portal, and supports Microsoft

Azure infrastructure, web and mobile services. Similarly, New Relics AWS plugin gives customers a single pane

for viewing New Relic application data alongside data from key AWS tools such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk,

Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS.

Cisco has a long history in the NPM area, given its network hardware roots and large installed base. The

companys Cisco Prime line encompasses a variety of NPM offerings for data center and cloud management.

These include: Cisco Prime Performance Manager, which gathers performance statistics for Cisco and

multivendor network devices spanning the network core, aggregation and access layers; Cisco Prime Network,

which provides automated network discovery, configuration and change management, with end-to-end views

of the physical and virtual network topology and inventory; and Cisco Prime Infrastructure, which provides

network-wide lifecycle management, assurance visibility and troubleshooting encompassing the data center,

WAN, branch office and wireless users. Many of these tools are designed to work together; for example,

combining Cisco Prime Network with the Prime Performance Manager gives operators granular visibility into

network and service topologies along with related performance metrics.

NetScout Systems expanded its product set considerably last year through an acquisition that included NPM

vendor Fluke Networks and VSS Monitoring, which provides network packet brokers and taps. NetScouts NPM

offerings include the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, which supports service management and

traffic-based intelligence across complex, converged IT environments. This platform provides metrics, analysis

and views into applications, service enablers, server transactions, user communities and the network, offering

customers visibility into the relationships across the IT environment.

NetScout added Flukes TruView line of products to its portfolio. Characterized as an application-aware NPM

product, TruView is an application and network performance monitoring and management tool that monitors

application transactions and reports response time for user, network and application tiers; monitors both

physical and virtual device/interface availability; and provides traffic analysis details across LAN, WAN, and

cloud environments. TruView also supports VoIP performance monitoring, among other features.


24/53


market summary


sdxcentral.com

TOP APM VENDORS

Respondents could choose their top three vendors

Cisco28%

Riverbed28%

IBM10%

Brocade18%

Other12%

Netmon4%

New Relic12%

InfoVista4%

BMC12%

Dell8%

SolarWinds18%

Oracle10%

NetScout/VSS20%

Microsoft20%

HPE20%

CA Technologies20%

AppDynamics22%

Dynatrace22%

0 20% 30%10%


25/53


market summary


Respondents could choose their top three vendors

sdxcentral.com

TOP NPM VENDORS

Cisco42%

NetScout/VSS34%

BMC8%

Ixia12%

IBM10%

Viavi4%

Spirent12%

Netmon8%

Other12%

Dell8%

Oracle12%

Corvil8%

InfoVista12%

HPE18%

CA Technologies18%

Brocade20%

SolarWinds30%

Gigamon26%

0 20% 40%10% 30%


26/53


market summary


Performance Management Products and the Road to Convergence

Theres clear advantage to having a converged APM/NPM solution, given the complexity of todays hybrid,

virtualized IT infrastructure and the interdependencies between applications and the underlying infrastructure and

networks that support them. However, its going to take some more time to fully develop these solutions.

Product complexity continues to be an issue. APM/NPM solutions are comprised of many modules and separate

tools. Vendors have many overlapping and not-yet-integrated offerings sometimes representing conflicting

messages even within the same vendor. Simplifying these offerings and abstracting actionable information for

easy consumption remains a priority. Providing customers with a comprehensive, coherent data set available to

a suite of APM/NPM tools and usable by various stake holders also remains a priority.

On the plus side, the industry is tackling the need for cloud support, SDN and NFV integration, and EUE

monitoring. In addition, some good approaches to the scalability challenge are emerging. Likewise, there are

various ecosystems of vendors already in place that are helping customers build an APM/NPM tool kit using a

best-of-breed approach.

The availability of SaaS-based offerings and fully managed APM/NPM services is helping drive down costs, and

this trend is likely to accelerate. In addition, the impact of SDN and NFV-related performance managementefforts has yet to be felt.

The following sections of this report covers the products in detail solicited from participating vendors, including

specific positioning of products in the NPM and APM space. Please note that this is not intended to represent an

exhaustive list, rather it focuses on a select number of products and vendors that have established an early

position within the SDN and NFV markets for performance and applications performance manage.

These vendors were selected via surveys and polls by SDx readers; they were also identified during discussions

the SDxCentral research team had with enterprise and service provider users.

While every attempt has been made to validate the capabilities listed in the profiles, SDxCentral advises end

users to verify the veracity of each claim for themselves in their actual deployment environments. SDxCentral

cannot be held liable for unexpected operations, damages or incorrect operation due to any inaccuracies listedhere.

SDxCentral welcomes feedback and additional information from end users based on their real-world

experiences with the products and technologies listed. The SDxCentral Research Team can be reached at

[email protected].

The following are the vendors covered in the report: Accedian, AppDynamics, Arista Networks, Astellia,

BigPanda, Big Switch Networks, BMC, Brocade, CA Technologies, Cisco Systems, Corvil, Datadog, Dell,

Dynatrace, EXFO, ExtraHop, Gigamon, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Idera, InfoVista, InMon, Ixia, Juniper

Networks, Inc., Kentik, LiveAction, LogicMonitor, Microsoft, Nagios, Netmon, NetScout, New Relic, Niksun,

Oracle, Pluribus Networks, Polystar, Qosmos, Radware, Riverbed, Rocana, Sinefa, SolarWinds, Spirent, Splunk,

Viavi, Zoho
mailto:research%40sdxcentral.com?subject=mailto:research%40sdxcentral.com?subject=


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FEATURED

category:

Market Report | Network Performance Management Takes On ApplicationsMarket Report |

CA Virtual Network Assurance(Click for Online Version)

www.ca.com/vna

520 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10022

[email protected]

(Director, Product Management)

1.800.225.5224

www.ca.com

PUBLIC

CA TECHNOLOGIES

Description of Company: CAs highly-experienced leadership team is committed to helping businesses

invent the future with software one innovation at a time. CA continues to create leading-edge IT software and

solutions for some of the most powerful companies in the world, including more than half of the Global Fortune

500, the 20 top global banks and the largest 25 federal agencies.

CA Technologies in SDxCentral Company Directory

Description of Product(s):

CA Virtual Network Assurance offers next-generation network performance and fault management capabilities to

reduce the risk in SDN/NFV deployments. The solution extends network visibility of existing infrastructure

management solutions with advanced collection, normalization and detection methods to remove management

complexity of the highly dynamic and complex SDN/NFV networks and service chains.

CA Virtual Network Assurance in SDxCentral Product Directory

Unique Value Proposition

CA Virtual Network Assurance aims to operationalize

SDN and NFV by producing easy to understand

visualization and targeting known vulnerable areas

of the new and complex network stack and service

chain.

Solution Demand

Financials, Government & Education, Retail, Telecom

Product Areas/Functions

Application performance monitoring; Cloud servicesmonitoring across public, private, and hybrid clouds;

Database diagnostics; Mobile device monitoring;

Protocol-level analysis; Real-time application

monitoring; Real time network monitoring; SDN

analytics; SLA monitoring

Monitored Application Protocols

SNMP, HTTP, HTTPS, REST, TFTP, SOAP, TFTP, TCP,

UDP

Monitoring Standards Supported

SNMP, Netflow, TWAMP, IPSLA, IPFIX, REST, IPDR via

EMSMaximum Scale

CA Virtual Network Assurance can discover, collect,

inventory, store, and analyze up to 2 million entities in 5

minute granularity simultaneously.

Pricing Model

CA Virtual Network Assurance has a flexible pricing

model based on physical and virtual devices.

SDN and NFV integration

CA Virtual Network Assurance interfaces through

numerous protocols with SDN/NFV controllers,

service orchestrators, cloud systems, and individual

elements to rebuild the complex network stack into

"easy to understand" visuals and dashboards so that

operational teams can understand and confidently

manage the new network.

Container Infrastructure Integration

CA Virtual Network Assurance can reside incontainers as well as monitoring the processes of

containers running NFV.

Cloud Integration (Private, Public, Hybrid)

CA Virtual Network Assurance has flexible probes

to monitor private, public, and hybrid cloud systems

bringing together a single pane for comprehensive

analysis.

Service Chain Topology

https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/http://www.ca.com/vnamailto:Timothy.Diep%40ca.com%20?subject=http://www.ca.com/https://www.sdxcentral.com/listings/ca-technologies/https://www.sdxcentral.com/listings/ca-technologies/https://www.sdxcentral.com/products/ca-virtual-network-assurance/https://www.sdxcentral.com/products/ca-virtual-network-assurance/https://www.sdxcentral.com/products/ca-virtual-network-assurance/https://www.sdxcentral.com/products/ca-virtual-network-assurance/https://www.sdxcentral.com/listings/ca-technologies/https://www.sdxcentral.com/listings/ca-technologies/http://www.ca.com/mailto:Timothy.Diep%40ca.com%20?subject=http://www.ca.com/vnahttps://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/


28/53


FEATURED

category:


Network Testing and NPM

Market Report |

Contrail(Click for Online Version)

www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/sdn/contrail/

1133 Innovation Way

Sunnyvale, California 94089 USA

[email protected]

888-JUNIPER (888-586-4737

www.juniper.ne

PUBLIC

JUNIPER NETWORKS, INC


Contrail Analytics, built on open APIs, provide

a seamless single logical view of the network in

one place. The analytics nodes are responsible for

the collection of system state information, usage

statistics, and debug information from all of thesoftware modules across all of the nodes of the

system. The analytics nodes store the data gathered

across the system in a database that is based on the

Apache Cassandra open source distributed database

management system. The database is queried by

means of an SQL-like language and representational

state transfer (REST) APIs. This data helps in

correlating underlay and overlay networks in the

datacenter.

Solution Demand

Cloud service providers, Financials, Government &

Education, Retail, Telecom


Cloud services monitoring across public, private, and

hybrid clouds; Load-balancing / application delivery

control, Real-time network monitoring, Response-time

analysis network, SDN analytics, SLA monitoring,

Server/Compute Monitoring

Pricing Model

Contact Juniper Networks at [email protected].


Based on the TCP/UDP port, Contrail Analytics can

determine the application type and provide detailed

analysis of flows & traffic metrics. The northbound

Contrail Analytics APIs is open and schema-aware

APIs. The storage and retrieval of flows uses smartflow sampling, and all processing is horizontally

scalable. This enables responsive, real-time

and resource-efficient analysis. In addition, Contrail

Analytics collects and monitors

the following information:

Operational State , Alarms and Object Logs for

system object such as virtual machines, virtual

networks, service instances, BGP peers, routing

instances, and the like.

System log (syslog) messagesinformational and

debug messages generated by system software

components.

Trace messagesrecords of activities collectedlocally by software components and sent to

analytics nodes only on demand.


Contrail Analytics supports Kubernetes and Docker.

Maximum Scale

Contrail Analytics is horizontally scalable with

performance up to 100,000 messages per second per

analytics node.

Description of Company: Juniper Networks strives for solutions that give its customers true advantage over their

competition, whether thats bringing new, revenue-generating services to market in minutes versus months; or

reducing network costs; enabling smarter, more efficient business processes; providing security and protection

for their most valuable assets; or delivering a richer end-user experience.

Juniper Networks, Inc. in SDxCentral Company Directory


Juniper Networks Contrail is a simple, open and agile Cloud Network Automation platform that implements secure

multitenancy and enables dynamic service chaining in private, public, and hybrid clouds. Contrail analytics provides

the right abstractions, aggregation, and syncing mechanisms to report and present information that can be used by

humans to operate and monitor a multi-tenant datacenter.

Contrail Analytics consists of two components:

1. An IDL for describing information that applications can send to Contrail Analytics, and C++ and Python

libraries for applications to do so.

2. An Analytics Engine that consumes information from applications, stores it, and presents it to clients via

the north-bound Contrail Analytics API.

Juniper Contrail Networking in SDxCentral Product Directory
https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/sdn/contrail/mailto:Contrail-Info%40juniper.net%20?subject=http://www.juniper.net/mailto:contrail-info%40juniper.net?subject=https://www.sdxcentral.com/listings/juniper-networks/https://www.sdxcentral.com/listings/juniper-networks/https://www.sdxcentral.com/products/juniper-contrail/https://www.sdxcentral.com/products/juniper-contrail/https://www.sdxcentral.com/products/juniper-contrail/https://www.sdxcentral.com/listings/juniper-networks/https://www.sdxcentral.com/listings/juniper-networks/mailto:contrail-info%40juniper.net?subject=http://www.juniper.net/mailto:Contrail-Info%40juniper.net%20?subject=http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/sdn/contrail/https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/https://www.sdxcentral.com/reports/network-performance-management-2016/chapter-4-products/


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FEATURED

category:

Market Report | Network Performance Management Takes On ApplicationsMarket Report |

VCF Insight Analytics(Click for Online Version)

www.pluribusnetworks.com/products/network-performance-monitoring/

2455 Faber Place , Suite 100

Palo Alto, California 94303

[email protected]

1.650.289.4717

www.pluribusnetworks.com

PRIVATE

PLURIBUS NETWORKS

Company Size

51-200


Replaces Network Packet Brokers and Analysis tools

for the most common use cases. Reduces the cost of

network monitoring by up to 80% and can provide

application-level analysis to enable troubleshooting

and performance management of applications such

as HTTP, VDI, Hadoop and network storage.

Solution DemandFinancials, Government & Education, Healthcare, Retail


Application performance monitoring, Real-time

network monitoring, Response-time analysis

applications, Response-time analysis network, SDN

analytics


VCF-Insight Analytics is aware of all popular TCP

applications. Including general purpose ones like

FTP and HTTP, as well as more modern apps such

as those for VDI, Hadoop as well as the Converged

Infrastructure suppliers like Nutanix.

Monitoring Standards Supported

sFlow, IPFIX

Maximum Scale

No known limit. Uses Elastic search technology to allow

instant navigation through BILLIONS of flows without

pause.

SDN and NFV integration

Works with any 10G/40G environment via the

deployment of inexpensive hardware aggregators

which connect to existing SPAN/MIRROR ports.

These aggregators monitor all packets and essentially

convert those packets into FLOWS, metadata is

added and then stored indefinitely. The User Interface

of VCF-IA allows interactive navigation through any

quantity of this stored information with interactive

performance. Directly connects to any Pluribus

networks already in place without any additionalhardware.


Any flow of information is monitored and the business

application is stored. Application can exist on a server

directly, in a VM or in a container. It is the flow of

information across the network that is monitored, not

just the raw packets.

Cloud Integration (Private, Public, Hybrid)

Any flow of information, where hardware aggregation

SPAN/MIRROR port access is available can be

monitored.

Pricing Model

Hardware aggregators at about $300/10G port, VCF-

Insight Analytics license starting at $25K for 100Million

flows.

URL for Licensing/Pricing Information

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com/products/vcf-

insight-analytics/

Description of Company: Pluribus Networks provides data center solutions that allow your business to run

unconstrained. Our software-defined, open networking, fabric-based solutions transform existing network

infrastructures into flexible and strategic assets fully aligned with todays digital business needs. Our Virtualization-

Centric Fabric (VCF) architecture provides unprecedented insight, agility and security to customers seeking to

simplify operations, run more cost effectively and bring new applications online faster.

Pluribus Networks in SDxCentral Company Directory


VCF Insight Analytics is a monitoring solution intended to replace the most common deployment of packet brokers

and analysis tools. It provides an inexpensive means to monitor and track the performance of business application

flows of information, and can be used with or without existing Pluribus Networks based switching fabrics.

VCF Insight Analytics in SDxCentral Company Directory

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Market Report |

SkyLIGHT VCX Controller(Click for online version) SDxCentral Company Listing


SkyLIGHT VCX Controller is the industrys first performance assurance controller employing Network Function

Virtualization (NFV) to bring advanced monitoring capabilities network-wide, without the need for expensive, high-end

test equipment. The VCX provides national scale, real-time performance monitoring using existing network elements as

part of the instrumentation, combining all the benefits of virtualization without compromising test speed or precision.

Unique Value Proposition Solution Demand

The SkyLIGHT VCX Controller offers enhanced network

performance, Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality

of Experience (QoE) visibilityat a fraction of the

cost of traditional solutions. Applications as diverse

as virtualized customer premises equipment (vCPE),

mobile network monitoring, and financial services

transaction assurance can all be implemented simply,

quickly, and ubiquitously.

Cloud Service Providers, Financials, Telecom


Protocol-level analysis, Real-time application monitoring,

Real-time network monitoring, SLA monitoring

Pricing Model

Standards-based reflectors (e.g. TWAMP) are used to

collect QoS metrics, and other standards-based and

patented techniques are used to augment collected

data to extract one-way performance metrics and

derive microsecond precision without requiring clock

synchronization between test points.

Customers

Telefonica (globally), Colt Technology Services, T-Mobile,

SK Telecom, Telecom Italia, CenturyLink

Aristas CloudVision Platform(Click for online version) SDxCentral Company Listing

Description of Product(s):The CloudVision platform is a software suite of services that deliver further operational simplification of the Arista physical

infrastructure. Arista CloudVision is a network-wide approach for workload orchestration and workflow automation as a

turnkey solution for cloud networking.

ACCEDIAN NETWORKS INChttps://accedian.com/

PRIVATE

ARISTA NETWORKSwww.arista.com

PRIVATE


Arista has pioneered the networking industry with its

software-defined cloud networking approach, built on

the programmable interfaces, publish-subscribe state

separation, resilient fault containment, and self-healing

attributes of Arista EOS. CloudVision extends the same

architectural approach of EOS across the network for

state, provisioning, change management, and visibility.Customers

https://www.arista.com/en/company/customer-

testimonials

Solution Demand

Cloud Service Providers, Financials, Government &

Education, Healthcare, IP Storage & Big Data, Media


Cloud services monitoring across public, private, and

hybrid clouds, Database diagnostics, Deep packet

inspection (DPI), Protocol-level analysis, Real-time

network monitoring, Response-time analysis network,

SDN analytics, SLA monitoring

Pricing Model

CloudVision is available as a software subscription via

the following two feature set offerings:

A CloudVision license (SKUs starting with SS-CV)

which includes all available CloudVision functionality.

A CloudVision Lite license (SKU starting with SS-

CV-LT) which includes a subset of CloudVision

functionality.

Pricing starts at $295/device per month.
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Market Report |

Big Monitoring Fabric(Click for online version) SDxCentral Company Listing


Big Monitoring Fabric (BMF) is a modern 1G/10G/40G network visibility fabric that leverages high-performance, open

Ethernet switches to provide pervasive security monitoring and visibility of an organizations network traffic at ultra-low

CapEx/OpEx costs. Big Monitoring Fabric delivers feature parity with leading Network Packet Brokers, for 50% less. This

enables organizations of any size to tap every rack, and achieve pervasive network visibility - both East - West and North

- South.

Unified Visibility Fabric(C

sdxcentral network performance management takes on applications report 2016 a

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