Definition and good criteria of Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD)

The definition and good criteria of Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) are allow for network engineers to understand the performance of applications and infrastructure components via network instrumentation. Additionally, these tools provide insight into the quality of the end user’s experience. The goal of NPMD products is not only to monitor the network components to facilitate outage and degradation resolution, but also to identify performance optimization opportunities. This is conducted via diagnostics, analytics and debugging capabilities to complement additional monitoring of today’s complex IT environments.

Inclusion Criteria:

• The ability to monitor, diagnose and generate alerts for:
  • Network endpoints — Servers, virtual machines, storage systems or anything with an IP address by measuring these components directly in combination with a network perspective.
  • Network components — Such as routers, switches and other network devices. This includes SDN and NFV components.
  • Network links — Connectivity between network-attached infrastructure.
• The ability to monitor, diagnose and generate alerts for dynamic end-to-end network service delivery as it relates to:
  • End-user experience — The capture of data about how end-to-end application availability, latency and quality appear to the end user from a network perspective. This is limited to the network traffic visibility and not within components such as what application performance monitoring is able to accomplish.
  • Business service delivery — The speed and overall quality of network service and/or application delivery to the user in support of key business activities, as defined by the operator of the NPMD product. These definitions may overlap as services and applications are recombined into new applications.
  • Infrastructure component interactions — The focus on infrastructure components as they interact via the network, as well as the network delivery of services or applications.
• Support for analysis of:
  • Real-time performance and behaviors — Essential for troubleshooting in the current state of the environment. Analysis of data must be done within three minutes under normal network loads and conditions.
  • Historical performance and behaviors — To help understand what occurred or what is trending over time.
  • Predictive behaviors by leveraging IT operations analytics technologies — The ability to distill and create actionable advice from the large dataset collected across the various data sources.
• Leverage the following data sources:
  • Network device generated data, including flow-based data sources inclusive of NetFlow and IPFIX.
  • Network device information collected via SNMP.
  • Network packet analysis to identify application types and performance characteristics.

Feel free to contact E-SPIN for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics infrastructure and application security, infrastructure availability and performance monitoring solution.