Visibility – enabling full control over the network and application behavior
This section focuses on the Ipanema System’s visibility features, which yield the best application performance monitoring, reporting and troubleshooting on the market.
Visibility made easy:
Ipanema visibility automatically discovers applications across the entire network using layer 3 through 7 classification
With Ipanema's visibility features, it is simple to discover how the network is used by applications. Classification of the flows is done automatically by deep packet inspection (DPI) technology. Both business and non-business applications are recognized, even if they use dynamic port numbers - such as with VoIP/RTP - or dynamic protocols, such as with Skype.
This information can be displayed with multiple levels of granularity, from globally across the entire network down to local subnets and even to individual computers.
Ipanema visibility empowers application performance monitoring for all flows in real-time
The Ipanema System measures per-application-flow visibility metrics such as TCP round-trip time (RTT), TCP server response time (SRT) and TCP retransmissions. Ipanema visibility also include unique one-way visibility metrics that provide the highest-precision information available about the performance of any protocol, including the UDP flows used in VoIP and video. These metrics include one-way transit delay, jitter and packet loss.
One-way visibility metrics are a requirement for measuring the network performance that is actually delivered to end-users, and for accurately showing the network contribution to application performance from LAN-to-LAN. They also make it possible to localize performance faults to the end-user, to the WAN or to the server, enabling rapid fault isolation and significantly decreasing time to repair. Ipanema provides two direct end-user quality of experience (QoE) visibility measures:
- Mean opinion score (MOS) for voice
- Application quality score (AQS) for data
The MOS is computed using the ITU’s E-model, while the AQS is computed using a proprietary Ipanema model based on the comparison of multiple metrics with per-application performance target values. MOS and AQS visibility measures take the drudgery out of assessing end-user QoE by having the system itself do the hard work of compiling network visibility metrics into the crucial judgments of how well each application is doing. This makes it possible to provide at-a-glance reports of application quality for every active end-user on the entire network in real-time, using intuitive green/amber/red displays.
Ipanema visibility includes application performance reporting for communicating throughout the organization
Ipanema visibility tools include numerous report templates that can be instantiated for any time, application and topology criteria. Templates include detailed technical reports useful to network or site managers, as well as summary reports for the CXO or application owners that communicate network and application usage and application performance across the organization.
The Ipanema visibility tools also include powerful reports describing the impact of the optimization and acceleration mechanisms on end-user QoE, including a unique, live Acceleration Factor that shows the improvement in application performance without having to actually turn off the features to measure a baseline. Visibility reports are updated in real time (hourly reports are updated once per minute) and are interactive; they are click-able with hyper links between them to support drill down and include the flexibility to go back in time using intuitive slider controls.
Ipanema visibility permits rapid application performance troubleshooting with its global application performance views, alarming and drill down
The Ipanema System includes sophisticated visibility tools to build upon its unique ability to present a global real-time view of application performance. Flexible alarms can be set on any local or global application performance event. For example, a dedicated alarm can be triggered in real-time when the MOS of a VoIP call goes below toll-grade quality anywhere on the network, or when the AQS indicates unacceptable performance of SAP applications at a distribution hub or factory.
The Ipanema System also features unique “bird’s-eye views” of application performance using a compact, hierarchical, graphical, real-time representation via Ipanema Visibility Maps. In these Visibility Maps, each rectangle represents a collection of application flows, with the size of the rectangle indicating the amount of data flowing and the color (green through amber to red) representing the quality of the flows according to their AQS or MOS metrics. Once a problem has been identified through an alarm or an amber/red indication, a Visibility Map offers the ability to drill down progressively to an “oscilloscope view” of a given flow that graphs all the fundamental visibility metrics of the flow, and which is updated every 10 seconds.
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