Application response time is the most fundamental component of understanding application performance and end-user experience. A Performance-First approach to managing application delivery begins with an in-depth understanding of application response time between clients and servers.

NetQoS SuperAgent, the application performance management module of the NetQoS Performance Center , tracks and measures end-user response time — without desktop or server agents. SuperAgent monitors every TCP application packet traversing the network between clients and servers, providing metrics such as network, server, and application latency for all mission critical applications.

SuperAgent's analysis enables rapid troubleshooting of application delivery bottlenecks coupled with reports to prove application performance.  SuperAgent continually measures and analyzes application performance for all transactions, compares the response time against intelligent baselines and thresholds, and alerts on any performance deterioration.  In addition, SuperAgent automatically investigates the cause of problems as they occur and provides key diagnostic data to help you quickly solve network and application performance problems.

SuperAgent enables application performance efforts by providing a consistent and common set of service quality metrics for your internal users and external service providers, even if no formal service level agreements (SLAs) are in place.

How Will NetQoS SuperAgent Help You?

1. Mitigate risks from planned changes and unexpected events with before and after analysis

• Measure the impact of infrastructure changes and new applications on end-user application performance
• Validate the effectiveness of an MPLS migration, VoIP deployment, WAN optimization deployment, QoS policy change, load balancing, and link and server upgrades

2. Solve network and application performance problems faster by isolating the source to the application, server, or network

• Understand normal performance through intelligent baselines
• Know immediately when network and application performance becomes unacceptable to end users
• Quickly find the source of network and application performance problems
• Gather diagnostic data automatically through filtered packet captures, SNMP polling, and traceroutes

Application Performance Diagrams in NetQoS SuperAgent provide at-a-glance views in application delivery bottlenecks

3. Prove the performance of applications delivered over the enterprise network with service level reporting

• Evaluate how the network infrastructure is delivering applications to end users
• Provide both performance and availability SLA measurements
• Monitor SLAs by measuring all transactions from all users in the enterprise, without synthetic transactions

Features

Response Time Analysis

• End-user response time broken down to network, server, and application components
• Detailed and summarized reporting via drag-n-drop selection
• Multi-tier application support

Automated Baselining

• Comparison of current performance versus historical performance for any network-server-application combination
• Calculations based on time-of-day, day-of-week, and day-of-month

Service Desk/Operations Center Views

• Summary views of application, server, and network performance
• Bubble-up rankings for the most pervasive performance issues
• Simple workflows for incident identification, verification, and proper escalation

Proactive Alerting

• Intelligent thresholds constantly adapt to changing network environments
• Customizable tuning for increasing/decreasing alerts
• Out-of-the-box thresholding
• Safeguards for time-over-threshold and false alert prevention

Automated Investigations

• Automatic network diagnostics during application performance issues via traceroute, packet capture, and SNMP queries
• Configurable for scheduled or on-demand run

Third Party Integration

• Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) integration for accurate application response times pre- and post-optimization
• Cisco Network Analysis Module (NAM) integration for data collection via blade servers and second-level response time granularity
• EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager (ADM) integration for automated application discovery and dependency maps