Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Service Assurance
NETSCOUT Special Edition
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Publishers Acknowledgments
Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Project Editor: Carrie A. Johnson
Acquisitions Editor: Steve Hayes
Editorial Manager: Rev Mengle
Business Development Representative:
Sue Blessing
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
About This Book......................................................................... 2
Foolish Assumptions.................................................................. 2
Icons Used in This Book............................................................. 2
Beyond the Book......................................................................... 3
Where to Go from Here.............................................................. 3
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
iv
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Introduction
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Foolish Assumptions
Its been said that most assumptions have outlived their
uselessness, but Ill assume a few things nonetheless! First, I
assume you have a working knowledge of network operations
management and networking technologies. This book is for
anyone and everyone involved in network operations not
just system or network administrators!
Next, I assume you work in an enterprise or service provider
organization with stringent servicelevel agreements (SLAs)
and uptime requirements for maintaining network and application availability 24/7/365. Finally, I assume that youre a
business or technical decision maker, such as a CIO or IT
manager, evaluating service assurance solutions for your
organization. If thats the case, this is the book for you!
Introduction
You wont find a map of the human genome here, but if you
seek to attain the seventh level of NERDvana, perk up! This
icon explains the jargon beneath the jargon!
Thank you for reading; I hope you enjoy the book; please take
care of your writers! Seriously, this icon points out helpful
suggestions and useful nuggets of information.
This icon points out the stuff your mother warned you about.
Okay, probably not. But you should take heed nonetheless
you might just save yourself some time and frustration!
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Chapter1
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Service Assurance
in the Enterprise
Modern enterprise systems and networks are fragile. The role
of IT has become that of guardian of the connected world,
and its a critical role. Proactive, realtime monitoring is a
must to ensure ongoing, optimal service (see Figure12).
Service assurance is enabled with tools that instrument
complex environments and measure normal and abnormal
events in large enterprises. A service assurance platform
that collects and analyzes trafficlevel data can alert IT when
problems occur. It can also evaluate the overall health of
services, and identify potential problems early, before they
impact multiple users or the entire enterprise.
Service triage is the practice of identifying the root cause of
problems in complex multitier physical and virtual service
delivery environments. Meantimetoknowledge (MTTK) is
the time required to complete service triage and can consume
as much as 90 percent of the overall time to repair a problem.
You learn more about service triage in Chapter2.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
10
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Chapter2
Introducing the
nGeniusONE Service
Assurance Platform
In This Chapter
Looking at the service assurance solution
Exploring additional capabilities in nGeniusONE
Solving operational challenges proactively
our organization needs a solution that has holistic visibility and global reach a crystal ball that can monitor
your service delivery infrastructure from a high level but also
has deepdive troubleshooting capabilities. Although not quite
a crystal ball, NETSCOUTs nGeniusONE platform, powered by
patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology, is a
service assurance architecture that addresses this complexity
in a comprehensive, costeffective way. In this chapter, you
discover how the nGeniusONE platform and ASI technology
can help assure service delivery and provide efficient service triage. You also learn how nGeniusONE provides these
capabilities with pervasive endtoend visibility across physical, virtual, and hybrid service delivery environments, and
addresses IT operational challenges.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
12
nGeniusONEs pervasive and scalable data collection is established by instrumenting strategic access points across the
service delivery infrastructure, using physical and virtual
appliances. The traffic-flow data collection and aggregation
is passive and nonintrusive, and can scale to collect any
required volume of data.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
13
The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform aggregates, correlates, and contextually analyzes the metadata gathered from
data sources in physical and virtual environments. It then
creates realtime holistic views of service performance, establishes performance baselines, and facilitates serviceoriented
troubleshooting workflows.
Service Triage
Identification of failed service delivery components is the
number one concern in performance management. Service
triage is the process of identifying and fixing problems that
impair application performance. nGeniusONE provides tools
and workflows that put power in your Network operators
hands to triage and investigate issues at high levels and, when
necessary, drill down all the way to the individual session and
traffic levels.
Interconnected tools including the Dashboard, Service
Dependency mapping, the Alert Browser, and Service
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
14
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
15
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
16
Additional Capabilities
ofnGeniusONE
In addition to delivering core service assurance and management capabilities, nGeniusONE includes additional capabilities, such as nGenius Intelligent Data Sources, network
discovery and mapping, advanced search, and session and
traffic analysis.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
17
Traffic Discovery
The Traffic Discovery feature finds and identifies applications
that are being monitored on your network segments. Using
traffic monitoring tools, nGeniusONE can discover unknown
protocols (see Figure 24). From Global Settings, you can then
label and mark them for monitoring in the configuration database. These protocols include
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), UDP (User
Datagram Protocol), and IP (Internet Protocol)
applications
Applications discovered based on port numbers
Undefined or inactive protocols in the nGeniusONE
database
Advanced search
The Search and Discover tool, located prominently at the
header level in all nGeniusONE modules, globally queries
a host of objects with the ability to discover all possible
associations for searched context. For example, if a clients
address is searched, Search and Discover also looks for the
nGeniusONE server, which applications are talking to this
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
18
Traffic Discovery
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
19
CompID
CellID
Location keys (such as sites, access point name, handsets, cell sites, and others)
Application services
Network groups
Hosts
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
20
Addressing IT Operational
Challenges with nGeniusONE
Todays IT operations largely rely on multiple functional
teams using silospecific tools each focused on assuring the
performance of a specific application, application tier, or
network component. The delivery of an exceptional user
experience is dependent on the ability of all IT operational
teams to work together to effectively collaborate across team
boundaries to optimize overall service performance and
troubleshoot issues. A compartmentalized model is outdated
and complicates the management of service performance and
availability, as well as capacity planning, across the different
application and network tiers.
While usage of specificpoint tools provides the individual IT
teams with deep visibility into their respective components or
silos, it lacks service delivery context, and often leads to the
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
21
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
22
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Chapter 3
Chapter3
Implementing nGeniusONE
in Your Environment
In This Chapter
Setting up services
Viewing dashboards, spaces, and the hierarchy tree
Determining service dependencies
Getting service alerts and monitors
Understanding nGeniusONE
Services
The nGeniusONE platform supports enterprise and service
provider environments with a servicefocused approach to
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
24
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
25
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
26
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
27
28
Unified Communications
Dashboard
Unified Communications (UC) is all about improving collabo
ration and boosting business productivity. The successful
adoption of UC services, such as VoIP, Video Conferencing,
Telepresence, and Desktop Video, assumes that service
quality will be sufficient for users to interact effectively and
consistently.
Assuring the quality of UC services is not an easy task. UC
services are complex and require unforgiving performance
levels with alwayson availability to meet the high expecta
tions of users and the organization. The reality is that many
UC deployments fail to achieve the internal traction desired
due to poor user experiences.
The UC dashboard, and other nGeniusONE components
including the Media Monitor, specifically address the monitor
ing requirements of multimedia environments (see Figure32).
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
29
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
30
Spaces
While nGeniusONE Dashboards provide quick visualization of
current service conditions, Dashboard Spaces help adminis
trators troubleshoot problems by providing a more granular
view of application service data over time. The context for
each Space comes from application services configured in
Service Configuration. Views can show data for an entire ser
vice or for a specified service member. If based on a complete
service, the view displays aggregated data for all members of
the service (see Figure33).
Figure 3-3:Spaces display views over time highlighting consistent or intermittent issues.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
31
alert list to see all alerts that have occurred for a selected ser
vice and time period.
The tree also enables navigation with context to other mod
ules for additional details and views. Selecting a service in the
tree provides the following options from the context menu:
Service Monitor: Provides an ataglance view of
applicationserver or network performance metrics
based on the service context
Service Dependency: Displays a map of the servers that
are engaged in providing a service, their interdependen
cies, and traffic and performance metrics for the servers
Alert List: Shows the alerts triggered on the service includ
ing details describing the nature and severity of the events
32
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
33
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
34
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Chapter 4
Chapter4
Exploring Service
Assurance Using
nGeniusONE
In This Chapter
Addressing unique industry issues in the enterprise
Looking at service provider challenges
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
36
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
37
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
38
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Chapter 5
Chapter5
Ten Benefits of
nGeniusONE Service
Assurance
In This Chapter
Maintaining service delivery management
Enabling Unified Communications
Monitoring the enduser experience
Recognizing the business benefits of nGeniusONE Service Assurance
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
40
Unified Communications
Performance Management
Unified Communications (UC) enables smarter collaboration
and improved business productivity when it works. UC
services are complex and require extremely high performance
levels with alwayson availability in order to meet the growing
demands of users and the organization.
nGeniusONE provides realtime, actionable intelligence that
enables desktop, network, telecom, and application teams to
see UC through the same lens. It enables IT organizations to
Proactively avoid performance degradations and service
outages
Quickly triage and identify underlying root causes of UC
service issues
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
41
Capacity Planning
andOptimization
nGeniusONE enables proactive enterprisewide capacity planning by providing IT teams with traffic monitors and customizable reports that display storage, bandwidth, memory, and
processing utilization. This capability helps keep IT projects
on budget and on time, and takes the guesswork out of properly sizing and optimizing new systems and applications.
nGeniusONE can also be used with load balancers and virtualization platforms. With proactive monitoring of utilization,
load balancers can be scripted to spin up additional virtual
application or web servers when necessary. These resources
can then be automatically deactivated when they are no
longer needed. Similarly, network links can be intelligently
optimized with Quality of Service (QoS) and Class of Service
(CoS) tagging when network managers have actionable, real
time data on bandwidth usage.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
42
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
43
IT Operational Excellence
IT operational excellence requires building a serviceoriented
IT organization that is closely aligned with the business and
can rapidly and flexibly deliver and support new and existing products, services, and processes. nGeniusONE helps IT
teams achieve operational excellence by empowering them to
Assure business service availability/continuity
Simplify management of complex service delivery
environments
Reduce operations and support cost and complexity
Proactively detect service degradations and resolve
issues before they impact users
Increase the efficiency and utilization of existing service
delivery infrastructure
Break down operational and toolbased silos
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
44
Network Visualization
andAwareness
Understanding your network architecture is critical for
effective optimization and troubleshooting. As networks
have become more complex, so has the task of visualizing
and documenting the physical, virtual, and logical network.
nGeniusONE helps IT teams visualize and maintain awareness
of a constantly evolving network architecture that includes
equipment, IP addressing, traffic flows, and system/service
dependencies.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
These materials are 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.