Network Instruments, a business unit of JDSU (NASDAQ: JDSU), has announced the latest edition of its cornerstone Observer® Performance Management Platform. Observer Platform 17 provides network managers and engineers a comprehensive, intuitive approach to:

• Proactively pinpoint performance problems and optimize services.
• Integrate monitoring into the deployment of IT initiatives, including cloud, service orchestration and security.
• Easily manage access and share performance data with IT teams and business units.
• Quickly assess and optimize user experience with web services.

This comprehensive performance management solution also features redesigned, easy-to-use interfaces and workflows, expanded web user visibility, increased transactional intelligence, and enhanced integration with third-party tools and applications.

“The Observer 17 release uniquely positions the Platform for the future of IT and the network manager’s evolving role as a primary enabler of technology adoption throughout the enterprise and as a key troubleshooter,” said Charles Thompson, chief technology officer for Network Instruments. “Other IT teams are looking to the network team for greater application troubleshooting and support. Utilizing the newest features in Observer, they are well prepared for their constantly changing role by achieving quicker root-cause analysis, understanding applications in-depth, and easily sharing performance data with non-network teams.”

Key enhancements include:

• Intuitive, drag-and-drop interface and streamlined workflows transform Network Performance Management from an ad hoc practice to a proactive, collaborative process. IT can now manage, monitor, and assess performance in two clicks.
• Third-party system integration via Representational State Transfer (RESTful) APIs facilitate easier sharing of performance intelligence with other groups, as well as integration of monitoring technologies for successful service orchestration for cloud, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and virtual deployments.
• Enhanced Web Services Analytics provide greater insight into how end users are experiencing web services through expanded client-based and comparative details.
• Deeper transaction-level intelligence and correlative analysis allow for quicker and more effective application troubleshooting. With access to greater granularity, network teams are able to more easily assess relationships between transaction details and other performance variables for a higher degree of actionable insights.

The new Observer Platform features allow network professionals a more productive tool to stay on top of key IT trends and challenges such as:

IT Automation—As businesses increasingly transition to automated, self-service IT models involving the deployment of cloud, SDN and virtualized environments, these dynamic services are often being implemented without adequate monitoring. To minimize the ‘black holes’ created when users roll out or move IT services and resources without the network team’s knowledge, the new Observer Platform ties together the provisioning of IT resources with the automatic deployment of monitoring tools via RESTful API for complete visibility.

IT Alignment Across the Business—In delivering Unified Communications and Big Data initiatives, application teams now turn to network teams to lead the charge for metrics, intelligence and app problem solving, and troubleshooting. RESTful APIs and improvements in user management make it easier to integrate Observer 17 into external workflows and processes to help share network performance data with non-network teams.

Monitoring Mobile Experience—With movements to the cloud and increased access to web services by end users on mobile devices, Observer 17 brings a higher level of visibility and insight into how they are experiencing web services, regardless of the device. Observer now provides comparative visibility by browser type and operating system, alongside performance metrics, to determine if the user experience is the same via a desktop or mobile device.

Observer Platform 17 is currently available and includes Observer Apex™ (previously called Observer Reporting Server), Observer Management Server (formerly called Network Instruments Management Server), Observer GigaStor™, Observer Analyzer, and Observer Infrastructure products.

Thanks to JDSU Network Instruments for the article.