Application Delivery Monitoring: In the Spotlight

There was a time when the word “Security” spelt the biggest nightmare for owners of large networks. To keep the record straight, it still is one of the largest nightmares of network owners. But as more applications started running over networks that seemed to be getting more complicated by the day, a new issue seemed to occupy the worry-lines on their foreheads – an issue that was even more critical than security, given the immediate impact it had on user experience: The issue of seamless Application Delivery to the customer.

Now, this story is not new. All of us have experienced those occasional frustrating moments when the mail server crashes just as you are about send an important mail, or those nail-biting moments when a site freezes when you are just about to book that last movie ticket online.

Well, blame it all on lousy Application Delivery!

Increasing customer traffic, coupled with complex applications running over multiple servers located across geographies have made seamless delivery of application an art to be perfected.

And to master this art of seamless Application Delivery, one needs the power of information-information about what’s happening over your network- what applications are running on your network, what is the frequency of requests, where are the traffic bottlenecks, what is the optimal way to route traffic, what were the recent changes done on your network, who made the changes….and the list goes on.

It wouldn’t take an application delivery expert to figure that this kind of data can only be gotten from a sea of real-time data, streaming out of applications and devices running on your huge network.

So, this is about collecting data from Applications and Network Devices in real-time, right?
Not exactly. Collecting data is only the tip of the iceberg. Once you have this sea of data, the real challenge lies in running intelligent analytics over them and coming up with actionable insights. Data is only as good as the story it tells.

As your network grows both, in number of applications and the number of devices running on it, you increasingly start to feel the pain of not having a one-stop dash board to make sense of all that is happening on your network. You feel the need for a solution that would let you see what is happening on you network, sitting at one place

Ah! So it’s a one-stop dashboard that would help you solve your application delivery problems, you say. Yes, but if only it were as simple as it sounded. The effectiveness of an Application Delivery Analytics dashboard lies in displaying the kind of information that would help you manage your applications and network. In other words, what is the information that you would like to see on your dashboard? That’s the real challenge for an “Application Delivery Analytics” solution provider.

At Payoda, we constantly strive to identify the most important issues that plague Application owners and Network Administrators on large corporate networks. Here are some that we have identified so far:

•   Visibility

• Real-time visibility of the entire network topology
• Real-time visibility of data traffic running through each device/application.

•   Application traffic routing

• Enable and disable traffic through specified Servers and Data Centers
• Graceful routing: allowing existing sessions to complete before closing down a route.
• Forced Server shut downs and startups

•   Historic trending & significant events correlation

• Historic trends for Application/ device KPIs (CPU usage, traffic throughput, etc)
• Compare statistics across applications and data centers for during significant events

•   Application status and Threshold alerts

• Get notified on significant events and thresholds (such as server down, traffic disable, threshold violations, etc)

•   Housekeeping: User authentication, Access controls and Auditing of user actions

•   Troubleshooting Application Delivery bottlenecks in quick time

• Centralized visibility and control of all applications and devices. This makes diagnosis and troubleshooting far easier.

Whatever the Application Delivery needs be, Application Delivery Analytic solutions such as AppViewX can help you better manage your applications and network to deliver a superior application experience to your customers, consistently and cost effectively.