New Drivers, New Revenue for Network Performance Management

Mike Magri, Director of Industry Solutions, NetQoS

Application performance issues across wide area networks are rising and, as a result, small and medium businesses are demanding more from their providers: more visibility, tighter service-level agreements (SLAs), and greater information sharing. If you continue to focus solely on fault-based metrics, you risk failing to meet your customers’ needs and falling behind your competition. By providing visibility into key performance indicators such as traffic flows, quality of service (QoS) utilization, application performance and infrastructure operations, you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, reduce customer churn and generate new revenue streams. And you can do it quickly without burdening your engineering and operations staff with new equipment rollouts.

Trends such as more latency sensitive applications delivered across the WAN, the surge in voice and video traffic, and growing numbers of remote workers make the challenge of ensuring optimal application performance across the WAN increasingly difficult. In addition, technologies such as MPLS, WAN optimization and virtualization can make performance difficult to measure. Lack of visibility into network and application performance makes it difficult to manage services and plan for future capacity needs and service delivery improvements, especially when budgets are limited.

As organizations have realized they lack visibility into performance, the network performance management discipline has evolved from optional and ad hoc to an essential component of the IT team. Everyone needs to ensure consistent, acceptable service delivery to all users, local or remote. Larger organizations and early adopters already are focusing on performance management, but risk-averse enterprises, especially those with limited technical staff, are looking to their existing MSP relationships for new network performance service offerings.

So what technologies and types of services can you offer to meet the needs of your savvy customers? As I mentioned, device and utilization statistics alone just don’t cut it anymore: They are no longer the sole gauges of network health. Organizations need to first understand the performance of key applications running over the network and identify where there is opportunity for improvement. Service providers can provide this information through several types of offerings, including:

Traffic Visibility: Traffic analysis and visibility reporting services using Cisco IOS NetFlow or IPFIX can be done without the need for hardware probes, enabling organizations to understand the composition of network traffic, including which applications and users are using bandwidth, what servers are being accessed, and how applications map into the individual classes of service on each link. This yields the information needed to redirect or reprioritize application traffic and develop new policies or add capacity. It can also help your customers determine if they are ready to implement advanced technologies such as voice and video.

Application Performance: Services that report on end-to-end application performance are the best way to gauge how well the network is delivering mission-critical applications to the end-user and provides the best overall view of what is happening on the network. By reporting on the actual performance of these applications delivered to end users, as well as baselines and SLA compliance, you will provide reports to your customers that answer questions such as:

• What branch offices are receiving good or poor service?
• What is normal performance for an application or a group of users and how does “normal” change during busy and off-peak business cycles?
• Is latency occurring and if so, is the delay in the network, server or application?
• What impact did the new application have on other application response times?
• Did the infrastructure upgrade deliver the performance boost expected?

Infrastructure Performance: Services that report on device performance and provide for infrastructure management are obviously still necessary and are strong candidates for adding new revenue streams. This includes the performance of individual devices such as servers and routers via SNMP as well as Cisco IP SLA testing of site-to-site network latency, loss and jitter across the enterprise. In addition, Cisco Class-Based Quality of Service (CBQoS) can be used to help customers determine if their QoS policies are working as designed.

Unified Communications Quality of Experience: Services that monitor and report on the quality of voice, video, and unified communications delivered to end users are becoming increasingly important. Simply identifying poor Mean Opinion Score (MOS) values is not enough. To quickly prioritize trouble tickets and determine the most effective course of action, operations teams need to determine where the problem is and how many callers are affected.

Managed WAN Optimization: The need to optimize delivery of applications and measure the resulting performance improvements is critical as organizations deploy WAN optimization technologies from vendors such as Riverbed and Cisco, which can obscure performance metrics such as application response times. Many end customers do not have the expertise or desire to deploy these technologies themselves and are turning to their providers for a managed offering to deliver WAN Optimization that includes performance reporting.

The deployment architecture requirements for these offerings do not have to be a burden and can be accomplished with no customer premises equipment. End-to-end performance monitoring can be done out of your data centers, for instance. For traffic analysis, you can leverage your existing Cisco (or other industry standard vendors) infrastructure by simply turning on NetFlow (or IPFIX) on a few key routers and switches. This prevents the need for deploying hardware probes, which can be a cost-prohibitive administrative nightmare. In addition, you can integrate much of the performance data together to deliver robust, multitenant reporting.

The demand for network performance monitoring services gives you a ready market for generating new revenue streams. These services must complement your existing portfolio of offerings and fit well with your market positioning and differentiation. With the network performance management solutions in the market today, you can quickly develop these types of offerings with minimal upfront expense and get to market before your competition.

As the director of industry solutions for NetQoS, Mike Magri works with service provider and integrator customers to develop and bring to market new managed services based on NetQoS capabilities. Prior to NetQoS, Magri spent eight years with Accenture and IBM Global Services. He holds degrees in Computer Science and Business from the University of Pittsburgh. NetQoS, a CA company, provides network performance management software and services that help service providers, government agencies, and large enterprises improve application delivery across complex network infrastructures.