NetQoS Inc. has teamed with Cisco to help network engineers quantify the performance improvements derived from Cisco Application Delivery Networks deployed using Cisco Application Control Engine modules and appliances, and Cisco Wide Area application services products. In July 2007, NetQoS and Cisco together announced a management interface for Cisco WAAS to provide accurate response time monitoring in a WAN-optimized environment. Today, NetQoS is announcing advanced analytics support for Cisco ACE modules and appliances via the NetQoS Performance Center.

“Customers deploy application switches such as the new Cisco ACE appliance to improve the performance of mission-critical applications in the data center, and Cisco WAAS WAN Optimization solutions to improve application performance over the wide-area network,” said Gordon Daugherty, vice president of corporate development for NetQoS. “The NetQoS Performance Center provides the key metrics for building a comprehensive picture of Cisco Application Delivery Network improvements, including response times, which are critical to understanding how the application and server are performing for the end user, as well as Cisco IOS NetFlow traffic analysis and device performance monitoring.”

For example, to quantify the performance improvements of a Cisco ACE application switch, the NetQoS Performance Center baselines normal performance before deployment and continuously calculates network, server and application response times after deployment. Traffic analysis via NetFlow helps ensure that the same type and volume of traffic is still hitting the servers. In addition, device performance monitoring measures improvements in SNMP statistics such as CPU, memory, and disk utilization.

“Cisco Application Delivery Networks provide the acceleration, security, and availability customers need to improve application service across the extended enterprise,” said George Kurian, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Application Delivery Business Unit. “NetQoS specializes in providing performance analytics across an enterprise infrastructure. By extending support to include both Cisco WAAS and ACE, customers now have a single data-center-to-WAN solution to understand and prove the value they are receiving from our products, as well as help quickly troubleshoot any issues that may be impacting application delivery.”

When deviations from normal performance occur in a Cisco Application Delivery Network, the NetQoS Performance Center helps isolate the source of the problem to the network, server or application and launches automatic investigations into the issue. For instance, in one customer scenario the NetQoS Performance Center alerted the network team to a slowdown in server response time for a load balanced server. The NetQoS Performance Center showed that response times and CPU utilisation were abnormally high, and that the traffic coming from the edge to that particular server in the data center was a new worm. The network team configured the dpi functionality on the ACE module to block that traffic and resolved the problem.