Facilitate ITIL Best Practices with the NetScout Performance Management Solution
Summary of information on this page:
Supporting ITIL changes by managing the performance of networked business operations
The NetScout Performance Management Solution increases visibility into the network traffic flows that are the basis for most of today’s business operations. This real-time and historical information provides the necessary insight to help you quickly restore service, manage capacity, and understand the users’ quality of experience. In addition, the intuitive functionality and superior architecture help streamline your workflow in support of ITIL process improvements. Benefits include the ability to:
- Expedite incident resolution with contextual analysis of application response times and usage to provide consistent, high-quality service to the business
- Support infrastructure optimization and improved bandwidth consumption resulting in overall IT cost reduction
- Proactively plan deployment of future IT services and confirm available capacity to ensure service continuity and commitments
- Provide unified performance management to serve a number of job functions within the IT environment, facilitating process integration, and helping disparate IT “silos” to communicate with one another from the same set of data
Corporate dependence on the network drives process redesign
The enterprise network has evolved to serve a primary role in today’s business operations, putting IT in a position of increased accountability to the organization and end users because of the broad repercussions of network and application degradations. In order to deliver high levels of service to the business, IT departments are focusing greater attention on their own processes in order to gain efficiencies, and looking for management products that will provide metrics to help associate IT operations with business goals and the customer experience.
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has grown in influence to become the de facto standard for defining best practices for IT organizations and their service providers. It provides process definitions and high-level guidance on how to implement service excellence. The main body of ITIL focuses on two groupings of processes – Service Delivery and Service Support – which center on putting the business customer first when measuring IT’s value to the organization.
ITIL, workflow redesign and the NetScout Solution
The NetScout Performance Management Solution provides detailed insight into the network, showing you how, when, and by whom it is used. This high-definition visibility helps you to align IT performance with business goals and gives you the necessary facts to support incident and problem analysis. The NetScout Solution primarily supports the Service Delivery and Service Support areas of ITIL, lowering your MTTR and facilitating a streamlined performance management workflow. Examples of nGenius support include:
- Business Alignment: Networks are technologically complex constructions, whose language most business people don’t speak without training. But they can understand the network in terms of the application and business services that run over them. nGenius identifies all applications in the network, well-known, custom, complex, P2P, web-based, and multimedia, providing a view into business service response and utilization trends, helping you to make business-justifiable decisions about your time, budget, and policies. Information from NetScout’s next-generation data sources provide the most granular application metrics, but the NetScout Solution also incorporates application flow data from other sources, such as NetFlow.
- Benchmarking: You can’t demonstrate change if you don’t know where you started from. nGenius lets you capture a snapshot of business service performance at any given point in time by documenting network activity and identifying response time of key business applications across your enterprise. This benchmark allows you to track changes, trends and improvements over time.
- Incident Management: Incident diagnoses are difficult because of the inter-dependencies of the infrastructure components. That is why application flow data are so useful in the troubleshooting process. Real-time access to high-definition application traffic flows and packet analysis in the NetScout Solution provide the richest and broadest information available on the market today. The top-down approach to business-related network data speeds troubleshooting with context-sensitive drill-downs and data mining. Unique Workspace technology enables the correlation of all key data sets necessary to see the context of an incident in order to quickly restore service.
- Problem Management: nGenius provides continuous packet-level recording, providing evidence and forensic analysis to help get at the root cause of a complex application problem as evidenced within a packet trace.
- Automation: nGenius provides an early warning system with automatic anomaly detection and diagnosis, giving you a springboard from which to launch incident resolution.
- Streamlining Workflow: The robust and scalable architecture of the NetScout Solution brings efficiency to the incident troubleshooting process so you can quickly restore service. It includes intelligent performance alarms sent to your EMS (OpenView, IBM, Mercury) with embedded URLs from which you can launch a contextual view within nGenius. Seamless and contextual navigation down to sub-second granularity allows you to quickly solve and close incidents.
- Knowledge Sharing: Three characteristics of the NetScout Solution make it ideal for knowledge sharing: (1) it is a unified tool supporting multiple IT functions, so that colleagues can use the same tool and speak to one another from the same base of network understanding; (2) unique Workspaces can be shared with colleagues so that experts can demonstrate which information is critical for troubleshooting particular incident types; (3) the web-based architecture allows collaboration with colleagues around the globe to get the best resources on the case.
- Capacity Management: nGenius forecasts network and application growth and identifies areas in the network with too much or too little capacity. Additionally, because of the application-level visibility, you know how your infrastructure resources are being used so you can make strong business decisions about usage policies and growth, helping you to optimize utilization and making you a good steward of organizational resources.
- Enhancing Communication: Sending reports on IT service performance improvements helps to enhance relationships, trust, and credibility with the business. The NetScout Solution facilitates communication with easy-to-create and customize reporting. On-demand reports are highly useful for communicating service restoration post-incident, and scheduled reports allow for consistent reporting of status and progress.
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| Workspaces in nGenius Performance Manager allow you to display side-by-side all needed information to speed incident resolution. |
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Enabling Products
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