The Port 80 Black Hole, by Jim Metzler

Managing application performance in general - and identifying the applications that are running on a network in particular - are both very complex tasks. There are, however, some factors that make these tasks even more difficult. One factor is that a lot of traffic runs undetected over port 80. This is sometimes referred to as the port 80 blind spot. However, given the volume of traffic that typically transits port 80 combined with the risk associated with not being able to manage this traffic, it is justifiably called the port 80 black hole.

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An electric power company's day-to-day operations are extensive. They include generating power, sourcing supplemental power supplies, installing and maintaining power lines, customer meter readings, billing and collection, as well as buying and selling overcapacity with other energy companies. However, their main goal never changes, delivering power in a consistent manner to all.

Meeting this goal requires continual communications related to power demand and its delivery, as well as prompt information exchanges among all electric company employees. It further requires the networks and applications supporting these communications to be continuously available and running at optimal efficiency. Assuring effective delivery of networked business services demands the power and flexibility of the nGenius Solution.

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Any time new applications are added to a network, issues emerge from contention for bandwidth to spikes in unknown traffic to poorly performing services due to the use of a new WAN topology like MPLS. When the new applications are added as part of the integration of the acquired company, the network team must maintain high levels of performance for both existing employees and applications as well as for the new employees and applications. By combining deep-packet analysis and enterprise data monitoring into a single appliance specially designed to deliver high-performance and high-capacity monitoring, the nGenius AFMon has given Johnson Controls the breadth of evidence it needs to get to the bottom of tricky performance issues as these two networks become one.

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