Implementing network monitoring for organization is not something new for large enterprise networks; but for small to medium sized businesses a comprehensive monitoring solution is often not inside their limited budgets. Network monitoring involves a system that keeps track of the status of the various elements within a network; this can be something as simple as using ICMP (ping) traffic to verify that a device is responsive. However, the more comprehensive options offer a much deeper perspecti...

As networking becomes more complex, network management and monitoring has continued to evolve. In a world where technology is continually on the rise people must start becoming more aware of what capabilities are out there for the networks. There are vast amount of network management solutions out there to help aid your business. The elusive goal of network monitoring tools is not only to alert administrators when there is trouble on the network but to develop trends in the health of the network...

  PLAY BETTER WITH THE OTHER IT TEAMS. SHARE YOUR PACKETS Raise your IT profile by promoting the packet. Find other teams that might benefit from packet intelligence too. That application developer in the break room might be interested to know the network impact and chattiness of an internal app they’re coding. Performance monitoring solutions like the Observer Platform can provide access to packets and simplify the sharing of analysis with easy-to-read graphical reports and dashboards.&nbs...

Visibility Into the Business With virtualization, "Big Data," and the sheer complexity of enterprise networks on the rise, dynamic network monitoring of performance and security provides a critical business advantage. Ixia's network visibility solutions deliver ongoing insight into production networks to help maximize your company's productivity and profitability, as well as its return on new and existing IT investments. Leveraging state-of-the-art technology and techniques, Ixia's powerful, hig...

As we say goodbye to 2014 and review our network equipment plans for the new year, looking at replacement options is not enough. We have to consider the currents that network technology flows in and where they are taking us. Ignoring buying decisions and looking at the bigger picture provides an opportunity to assess what emerging companies are doing to redefine and redirect our network thinking, from the higher levels of standardisation, convergence and virtualisation down to how startups are m...

Industry Analysts say that approximately 85% of today’s networks will require upgrades to their data networks to properly support high-quality VoIP and video traffic. Organizations are always looking for a way to reduce costs, and that’s why they often try to deploy VoIP by switching voice traffic over to a LAN or WAN links. In a lot of cases the data networks which the business has chosen cannot handle VoIP traffic accordingly, generally speaking voice traffic is uniquely time sensitive, it can...

Is your performance management solution a target for attackers? With increasingly creative exploits, it is important to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to data protection. Performance monitoring tools that do not keep pace can leave your information vulnerable. TOTAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT The Observer® Performance Management Platform is a fully integrated solution, purpose-built to support the highest level of network security. Its features include: TLS-based 256-bit encryption for data i...

Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA) announced the industry’s only carrier-grade, high-density, 40 Gbps network monitoring switch to achieve NEBS Level 3 certification for operation in mission-critical telecommunications environments. This certification complements Ixia’s comprehensive portfolio of network monitoring switches designed to provide increased visibility into telecommunications and service provider networks, such as 4G LTE. The NEBS-certified Ixia Anue Net Tool Optimizer® solutions help network engin...

Ixia Network Visibility Solutions welcomes a guest blogger today, Tim O’Neill from LoveMyTool. Network engineers and managers need to think about today’s compliance requirements and the limitations of conventional data access methods. This article is focused on TAPs versus port mirroring/SPAN technology. SPAN is not all bad, but one must be aware of its limitations. As managed switches are an integral part of the infrastructure, one must be careful not to establish a failure point. Understanding...

Robust Monitoring to Meet Big Data Challenges Unstructured data accounts for as much as 80 percent of most companies' total data volume. This “Big Data” has customarily taken too long and cost too much to process and analyze. Now, however, emerging Big Data initiatives stand to transform these vast, untapped resources from a costly storage challenge into vital business intelligence for marketing, product development, stock trading, genetic research, and more. Big Data promises quantum gains in p...

Much of the discussion around the Observer Platform 17 release has focused on how the designs of the new user interface (UI) and other enhancements will assist network and operations teams to more easily manage service and application performance. This performance data and analysis isn’t just of value to IT but to the overall business. The challenge for performance management solutions has been providing this intelligence in a way that can be easily accessed and understood by other IT and busine...

"Enter the Visibility Architecture" "Buying more tools to deal with spiraling demands is counter-productive – it’s like trying to simplify a problem by increasing complexity. Visibility merits its own architecture, capable of addressing packet access and packet stream management. A visibility architecture that collects, manages, and distributes packet streams for monitoring and analysis is ideal for cost-savings, reliability, and resilience. The economic advantages of such end to-end visibility ...

A virtual architecture is one of the fastest growing aspects of the data center these days. There has been considerable adoption over the last several years. According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 server virtualization, virtualized x86 server workloads passed the 70% mark in 2014. This is a big surge from the approximately 50% mark held in 2012. While the market is surging with increased adoption, best practices need to be implemented to prevent rework and aggravation down the road. As ...

Network Instruments has announced the newest edition of the Observer Performance Management Platform. With redesigned, easy-to-use interfaces and workflows, expanded web user visibility, increased transactional intelligence, and enhanced integration with third-party tools and applications, Observer Platform 17 offers the network team a comprehensive, intuitive approach. What’s New Several components of the Observer Platform have changed significantly with this release. Observer Reporting Server ...

As mentioned in one of my previous blogs (Exposing The Ghost In The Virtual Machine), virtualization has been a great success story. At the same time, it holds hidden dangers that need to be managed. I want to take a couple minutes to outline those dangers and how to overcome them. So, here are the dangers that can be hidden in a virtualized data center: Potential security issues due unknown malware Potential outages due to lack of proper performance data Regulatory compliance issues due to lack...

Corporation’s networks today are expanding exponentially but, more importantly, today’s networks are the backbone and heart of a companies’ ability to perform its day-to-day business. When network failures occur, businesses cannot operate, revenues are affected, and loss of credibility/customer experience can be catastrophic. Maintaining a consistent high level of service availability drives greater customer satisfaction, it builds greater credibility, that in turn creates greater revenues by ma...

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...

Virtualization continues to be an important data center success story. This technology has reduced physical plant hardware footprints, power costs, and cooling costs – significantly improving the total cost of ownership for the data center. At the same time, however, virtualization technology has also introduced a set of problems. These problems have decreased the visibility into what is happening within the virtual network, and can be summarized as follows: Lack of visibility hides potential se...

In our area of technology, we often think of our products in terms of how they compare to the rest of the products in the same market segment. Maybe we can highlight one facet of a unique feature and point out how nobody else offers it – or at least not in that way. It is tempting to compare features line-by-line when you have competitors who offer products that are generally similar. But now I have the opportunity to talk about a market where nobody else has gone. Ixia can show something that i...

When it comes to ensuring consistent VoIP quality, what you don’t know can hurt you. Surprise changes to the network can leave end users unhappy and administrators scratching their heads. Even the smallest configuration and settings changes can have the potential to immediately and adversely impact applications. They can also be difficult to troubleshoot. To locate the source of any VoIP problem, it’s important to understand how critical changes in configuration, codecs, and user behavior can ki...