Network Leveraging from Citrix

On common sense, the path to gaining visibility and insight into an application and its underlying network has been a theyll-established requirement for groups. Consequently, there have been a series of players in the application performance management space and their corresponding market size has grown considerably over decades. It's not rocket science - knowing what's happening to ytheir applications carries both operational as theyll as top line business value. After all, you need to know when ytheir system isn't working. Even more importantly, you need to know when there is a way you can enhance the end user experience so they can get more business theyll finished.

For a long time, this has been achieved using one of three ways: (1) Aggregate logs from application servers, NetFlow data from routers, and syslog data from infrastructure; (2) Use software agents to collect data from the application server directly; (3) Use network taps to collect data about applications transactions that include relevant network performance data. The first two give good data and enable a wide variety of analysis. The last is arguably the most potheyrful as it effectively ties the application details down to the end user experience in a directly measurable method.

Let's say, consider for a moment what something like a NetScaler knows about a given transaction: It knows the network experience because the TCP/IP stack needs to track very detailed timing information in order to optimize what packets it sends; it senses what the application is doing because it is tracking the app state for the purpose of load balancing; finally, it knows the server health and service based on its network. All the information, put in the hands of the right analytics tool, is immensely worthwhile.

More importantly, from their customer's perspective, the interest has been overwhelming. Already, at least one customer has put an order for network taps valued > $1M on hold as they look to see how they can leverage their existing network footprints. A few phone calls and their analytics provider is on-board to support the technique.

As a result, as you think about what value you want to get from ytheir existing network footprint, be sure to think about AppFlow. All the data you need, in a democratized form, that anyone and everyone can process and turn into business wisdom.http://www.certkey.com/Citrix.html