By Shamus McGillicuddy, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
Network Operations and Analytics from CA Technologies has been named a winner of Enterprise Management Associates’ Innovator Award, which recognizes products and services that demonstrate true innovation in the IT industry and address the most critical challenges IT organizations face today.
Enterprise networks are more dynamic and unpredictable than they have ever been, thanks in part to software-defined networking (SDN), network virtualization, and cloud technology. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research has determined that network monitoring tools must evolve to account for this new networking reality.
For instance, EMA has determined that SDN adoption creates a new set of requirements for network monitoring software. In fact, the number one new SDN requirement of network performance monitoring solutions is the ability to detect and adjust monitoring to on-demand capacity changes.
Simply put, networks are more prone to change. One way to detect that change is monitoring active test traffic. According to EMA research, test traffic has recently emerged as the second most important data source that network managers use for network planning, engineering, and monitoring. EMA believes that SDN and the cloud are drivers of the rising importance of test traffic.
To address this new normal, CA Technologies has integrated its Network Operations and Analytics platform with partner solution Netrounds Active Testing and Monitoring. CA’s solution excels at passively capturing infrastructure metrics and analyzing that data in the context of what is known about the network. Netrounds specializes in injecting active test data into the network to discover how production application traffic will flow through and perform on the ever-changing network.
By combing the active service performance insight gained by the Netrounds solution with the passive infrastructure performance insight of CA Network Operations and Analytics, network operators can gain a better end-to-end understanding of traditional and new SDx network service quality from an end user’s perspective.
One example of how this integration will benefit network managers is a software-defined WAN monitoring. Netrounds test agents can actively monitor service performance between different SD-WAN endpoints. When Netrounds detects a problem, it can trigger an alert in Network Operations and Analytics platform. In the CA environment, network engineers now have a view of end user service context to refer to as they troubleshoot the underlying infrastructure issue that caused the service problem.
By strategically deploying Netrounds test agents at key points in the network, network operations can also use this combined solution to gain a reliable and sorely needed end user performance perspective. The agents can emulate real user traffic and network operators can use the combined solution to troubleshoot any end user problems detected. This capability is essential. Recent EMA research has found that network managers rate end user experience monitoring as one of the most valuable features of today’s network monitoring software.
The combined CA-Netrounds solution is an ideal example of how two vendors can deliver true innovation to the industry by integrating their complementary products. EMA believes the combination of CA Technologies and Netrounds helps network operations improve their service assurance capabilities. For this reason, EMA has presented CA Technologies with the EMA Innovator Award.
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