User:Huiguo01/Application Visibility

Network and Application Visibility As infrastructures become increasingly complex, organizations find significant gaps in their ability to monitor the performance of critical applications, and to gain actionable information to optimize application delivery. Application Visibility refers to the ability to understand an application’s operation dynamics. This include performance, security, availability, usage pattern, etc. Apparently, IT management team can most efficiently manage application delivery with such information.

According to “The Value of Network and Application Visibility” written by Aberdeen group in 2008, Best-in-Class organizations which implemented application visibility tools reported:

120% average improvement in application availability 54% average improvement in Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) 85% success rate in preventing issues with application performance before end-user are impacted.

However, traditional IT monitoring solutions are not effective when it comes to application level visibility, as they were mostly designed for network monitoring on device or TCP/UDP level. The techniques they used were typically Syslog, SNMP, and Flow (Netflow, sFlow). Today a wide variety of applications run in an enterprise environment. These include not only business critical applications such as SAP/Oracle, communication service such as VoIP, but also recreational applications like P2P file sharing, IM, and so on. Moreover Cloud Computing and SaaS (Software as a Service) are also driving applications to be webified and delivered from external providers. Many of these applications share common characteristics at network level, e.g. using TCP and same port number.

In this situation, only a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) solution is capable to provide accurate information about application traffic type and derive performance metrics such as response time. A DPI solution typically classifies network traffic into application types by looking deeply into every packet’s content (application header & payload) while doing wire-speed packet forwarding. It is an essential technology when it comes to providing complete Application Visibility.