OPNETs APM Xpert Suite

OPNET Recogized as a Leader in the

Solutions Suite Overview

OPNET Technologies, Inc.

AppResponse Xpert
End-User Experience, Network Monitoring and Analytics

AppSQL Xpert
Agentless Database Performance Monitoring

Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring

by Will Cappelli and Jonah Kowall, Gartner, Inc. September 2011*

Prior to our work with OPNET, IT engineers spent a significant amount of time analyzing trace data and performance metrics, frequently arriving at different and conflicting conclusions on the cause of performance problems... We want to spend less time firefighting and spend more time focusing on our strategic business goals. OPNET is a key enabler in this transformation.
Manager Network Planning and Engineering Financial Services Company

AppResponse Xpert passively monitors and analyzes end-user experience for all types of enterprise applications. Onboard analytics provide application recognition, user identification, root-cause analysis, and powerful business-level summarization. AppResponse Xpert simultaneously provides deep monitoring of the network and high-volume forensic storage. Optional modules include the Module for Database Performance Monitoring, the Unified Communications Monitoring Module, and NetFlow.

AppSQL Xpert provides deep visibility into database transaction performance through real-time monitoring. It tracks database usage for monitoring, troubleshooting, and performance optimization. AppSQL Xperts passive approach imposes zero overhead on database operation.

AppTransaction Xpert
Deep Transaction Performance Analysis and Prediction

AppResponse Xpert SaaS Edition

AppResponse Xpert SaaS Edition utilizes JavaScript instrumentation to measure end-user experience for web applications. Dashboards provide detailed reporting of performance, geography, platform type, and response time breakdown. It is particularly well suited to monitoring the performance of applications deployed in the cloud.

[AppResponse Xpert] gives us visibility that we cant get from any other tools. This would save us a lot of man hours in troubleshooting time.
IT Division State Government

AppInternals Xpert
Deep Application Component Monitoring and Analytics

AppTransaction Xpert provides detailed analysis of multi-tier application transactions. Using code-level and network-level forensic data, it builds a detailed transaction model for root-case analysis and predictive studies. AppTransaction Xpert Packet Trace Warehouse off ers centralized control of enterprise-wide desktop agents that collect packet traces and environmental conditions (CPU, memory, I/O, etc.) from user desktops. It provides a federated repository of forensic data to accelerate performance troubleshooting and application mapping.

A Comprehensive APM Solution Suite

Application Performance Management (APM) is now a key IT discipline because maintaining the performance and availability of applications is the primary service an IT department provides to the enterprise. To enable this vital activity, OPNET has been delivering pioneering APM capabilities for more than ten years, and has emerged as a leading provider of solutions in this rapidly growing market.

AppSensor Xpert
Agentless Application and Infrastructure Monitoring

Weve been at this for months and couldnt figure out why our server was dying. AppInternals Xpert figured it out in 5 minutes.
Infrastructure VP Electronic Media Company

I am positively impressed!
Senior IT Manager Global Travel Services Company

AppInternals Xpert traces user transactions through the application and provides deep monitoring for the individual components. It tracks hundreds of thousands of system and application metrics and performs powerful correlation analytics to detect patterns of behavior that rapidly identify the root cause of application performance problems. Exclusive low overhead technology enables AppInternals Xpert to continuously trace user transactions across all application tiers, with code-level detail.

AppSensor Xpert provides broad infrastructure monitoring, using remote instrumentation interfaces to capture performance information from infrastructure components including servers, application components, the application delivery network, and vendor-specific management systems. AppSensor Xpert supplies real-time and historical data for a more complete picture of the applications operating environment.

Benefits
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Observe the experience of real application users live, and alert on SLA violations. Trend historical performance of an application to detect or confirm degradation in user experience. Accelerate troubleshooting and remediation. Eliminate finger-pointing among teams, promoting cooperative approaches to solving problems. Detect early warning signs of application performance problems and take preventive action. Understand the relationships among applications and infrastructure components. Make informed decisions about infrastructure improvements related to application performance. Reduce the risk of delay or failure by verifying application readiness prior to deployment. Manage performance across the application lifecycle with a single tool suite to accelerate application deployment and prevent problems in production.

We have never seen anything end-to-end like this.

Head of Application Infrastructure National Bank, Middle Eastern Country

AppMapper Xpert
Whats in Your Application?

CX-Tracer
Troubleshooting Applications in Citrix-Hosted Environments

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About OPNET Technologies

OPNET Technologies, Inc. is a leading provider of application and network performance management solutions. OPNETs solutions deliver broad visibility and monitoring across infrastructure domains as well as deep data collection and analytics to enable powerful root cause diagnosis. These solutions have been operationally proven in thousands of customer environments worldwide.

AppMapper Xpert automatically discovers application and infrastructure relationships to create a runtime application dependency map. It leverages the instrumentation already in place for application performance management to build a comprehensive model of the application ecosystem.

CX-Tracer is a breakthrough solution that provides end-to-end visibility of user transactions traversing a Citrix server. It deterministically correlates front-end and back-end application transactions to provide end-user experience monitoring and transaction tracing across the Citrix tier. CX-Tracer works seamlessly with the APM Xpert suite products to enable comprehensive APM capabilities for Citrix-hosted applications.

Our approach to application performance management requires collaboration with and coordination among the application development teams and the IT infrastructure and operations teams. OPNET is the only company weve found that provides a complete end-to-end APM solution to make this a success.
CIO Financial Services Company

www.opnet.com
OPNET Technologies, Inc.
7255 Woodmont Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA phone: +1 (240) 497-3000 , email: info@opnet.com

www.opnet.com

2012 OPNET Technologies, Inc. OPNET is a registered trademark of OPNET Technologies, Inc. All trademarks are the properly of their respective owners and used herein for identification purposes only.

* Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartners research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.

Solutions Suite Overview

OPNET Technologies, Inc.

APM Capabilities
End-User Experience Monitoring
End-user experience (EUE) monitoring is the gateway to the other dimensions of APM. Modern enterprises use a diverse array of applications that include technologies such as web, voice, server-based computing, fat-client database, email, mobile apps, etc. Furthermore, trends like mobility and cloud computing create additional challenges for APM instrumentation. No single EUE approach can address all types of applications and deployments. OPNET has a multipronged strategy for EUE that includes passive monitoring, JavaScript injection, and client-side instrumentation. This flexibility allows customers to apply the best technology in each situation. AppResponse Xpertis a unique solution in the EUE space, offering not only end-user experience information at the transaction level, but also troubleshooting workflows to determine the contributors to application delay. AppResponse Xpert is available as an appliance-based solution as well as Software-as-a-Service.

Cross-tier Transaction Tracing and Analysis

AppInternals Xpert leverages exclusive low-overhead technology to continuously trace user transactions across all application tiers, with code-level detail. It assembles a complete picture of a transactions path across tiers for near real-time and historical analysis. It records and indexes all transaction traces not just samples with a highly-scalable, federated, big data approach, making it easy to find and analyze any transaction. AppTransaction Xpertis the industrys most popular and powerful solution for analyzing the performance of transactions end-to-end. It integrates with AppResponse Xpert and AppInternals Xpert for detailed transaction analysis spanning network and server components. CX-Tracer is a break-through solution that provides end-to-end visibility of user transactions that traverse a Citrix server, enabling faster, more accurate diagnosis of application performance problems in Citrix-hosted environments.

AppResponse Xpert pinpoints the source of application response time delay.

Application Mapping
AppMapper Xpert produces a runtime application dependency map, automatically discovering application and infrastructure components and relationships. It leverages APM instrumentation that is already in place to accurately reflect the application ecosystem at the time of execution. It is uniquely suited for dynamic environments such as virtualization, cloud, and SOA.

AppMapper Xpert automatically generates a run-time application dependency map.

AppInternals Xpert correlates performance metrics across application tiers to diagnose root cause.

Application Component Monitoring

Precise and detailed application component monitoring is fundamental to a comprehensive APM capability. OPNETs AppInternals Xpert continuously provides real-time visibility across all servers in the application environment. For enhanced visibility into database tiers, AppSQL Xpert provides zero-overhead monitoring. In addition, for agentless access to a vast collection of application component types, AppSensor Xpert uses remote access protocols and public interfaces, such as SNMP, to enhance the full picture of the application infrastructure.

Analytics
APM Xpert employs Federated Analytics, a highly scalable approach to monitoring application performance by distributing analysis closer to the monitored element. Federated Analytics is significantly more efficient than traditional techniques which require large amounts of data to traverse the infrastructure for analysis on a central platform. OPNET analytics monitor hundreds of thousands of metrics to automatically detect anomalous behavior, correlate information, identify the root cause of problems, and predict events and performance trends.

AppResponse Xpert provides proactive notification of performance problems, generating alarms when transactions exceed dynamic thresholds.

OPNETs High Definition APM Approach

Breadth
Applications are implemented across many functional domains in the IT infrastructure, including client, WAN, LAN, web/app server, database server, and storage area networks and servers, as well as other services (e.g., directory services) upon which the applications logic depends. All of these domains may have an impact on application performance. An APM solution with breadth provides visibility into most or all of these areas.

Depth
Depth represents the high resolution aspect of high-definition. It means delving deep into the infrastructure at a fine-grained level, to collect information rich enough to characterize problems, uncover behavioral patterns, and isolate the root cause of performance issues. OPNETs APM approach emphasizes a combined analysis of performance and forensic data. Performance data consists of metrics that typically reflect the transactional workload, as well as the response of the infrastructure to that workload. Forensic data more closely parallels the execution of individual transactions as they traverse the infrastructure and includes code-level traces (e.g., method call stacks), detailed resource tracking (e.g., memory allocations), and deep packet inspection of network traffic.

Analytics
Breadth and depth multiply to yield a challenge: vast quantities of data. Putting that data to work to solve problems requires advanced tools. We call these tools Analytics: a suite of algorithms and techniques for extracting useful information from data collected by the APM instrumentation. OPNET has been a pioneer in introducing progressively more advanced, yet practical, analytics in APM solutions.

Integration
To address each of the domains of an application requires specialized tools. These tools, by their very nature, have different workflows and manipulate different types of information. However, using the tools in a coordinated fashion provides far more support and efficiency to APM users. OPNETs integrated solution suite provides workflows that transition from domain to domain while preserving context, as well as combined views based on true correlation and data fusion.

Low Overhead
All the other capabilities cited become impractical to deploy if they impose overhead that noticeably impacts application performance. OPNET has specialized in developing zero-overhead passive monitoring and low-overhead agent-based technologies to collect data for its APM solutions. All of OPNETs solutions are designed for production environments.