10 steps to improve application and network performance

If you work in a network operations team, you know that it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand and ensure application performance for end users.

You need visibility into areas where problems may occur – end-user devices, networks, code, and infrastructure – to quickly identify and diagnose issues and minimize downtime. However, this level of visibility isn’t easy to achieve without deploying additional packet capture devices or remote site technicians. Blind spots are everywhere, making it difficult to focus on monitoring your most important applications. When nearly 50% of network traffic is web-based and all networks look the same, it’s harder than ever to identify your critical applications and stay ahead of performance. This can mean inefficient troubleshooting, longer resolution times, and an overall lack of application intelligence.

Who wants to face this situation?

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1. Find the root cause of the problem

Voice, video, and social media traffic can slow down your network. But with performance metrics tools for every application, location, and user, you can identify the source of any problems, from layer 7 application information all the way down to low-level addresses and ports, in just a few clicks.

2. Eliminate potential problems before they occur

Your solution should be able to proactively monitor and alert on meaningful performance changes so that you can avoid potential problems. The dilemma is, if you fix a problem before it happens and no one notices it and no one reports it to support, is it really a problem?

3. Reduce brownouts and downtime

When your critical network connection or business application fails, every minute counts. IDC found that users of Riverbed SteelCentral network performance management software experienced 34% fewer downtime incidents per month and reduced average incident duration by 51%. This can significantly improve end-user productivity.

4. Get proactive alerting and root cause identification

With full visibility into your network and proactive, real-time alerts on issues, you can deliver security and performance to your organization. Riverbed SteelCentral can detect threats or intrusions in your network, helping you comply with regulatory requirements and IT directives. This means fewer resources are consumed, and users and the bottom line are not impacted.

5. Mapping Transactions

A transaction map illustrates all the components used to complete a specific transaction and is a basic template for more effective problem solving and impact analysis. Because it reduces the sample of information to be analyzed, transaction maps are the cornerstone of a comprehensive monitoring strategy.

6. Integrate your tools

Manually aggregating data from multiple sources into a single business service view is a resource-intensive and time-consuming activity. A good network monitoring solution should reduce the number of tools you use to troubleshoot your network and should reduce the number of "dashboards" you have to look at to get the right network data.

7. Understand the dynamic environment of each business service

You should understand how services are delivered in your dynamic infrastructure. Modeling business services and mapping the components used to deliver them to end users is fundamental to accurate analysis of performance issues.

8. Simplify management

Your toolset should have broad domain monitoring capabilities that can be abstracted away to focus on services (e.g., CRM applications). This way, it can model the dependencies of business services on the underlying infrastructure used to deliver each application. In turn, you can gain better collaboration between global teams, improve resource prioritization, and simplify troubleshooting.

9. Collaborate with application support and development teams

Keep everyone on the same page with a comprehensive service dashboard. From the CIO and IT management to application managers to security and network teams, everyone with access to the same data can see a unified picture of the network and the applications and services on it. This means less finger pointing and faster problem resolution. A common, integrated view of all component data is a key feature of a management solution.

10. Plan for the future

The more you understand what’s happening on your network today, the better you can plan for future needs and network expansion. In addition, you can more confidently align your network and IT resources with business priorities. Planning new service deployments, addressing new cloud and mobile applications, and data center consolidation projects will be easier and less risky.

Figure 1

SteelCentral dashboards include everything you need to know, from the highest level to the most detailed, so you can drill down to root cause and isolate issues with a single click. This chart illustrates deep application visibility, allowing you to identify your most traffic-intensive applications on a minute-by-minute basis.