Network Performance Insight value propositions

Network Performance Insight® is a performance monitoring and diagnostic solution that is integrated with IBM® Netcool® Operations Insight. It can help enterprises detect, isolate, and diagnose anomalous network performance events and maintain optimal performance of IT resources.

Currently, Network Performance Insight supports Flexible NetFlow. Flexible NetFlow allows a granular and accurate traffic measurements and high-level aggregated traffic collection.

It is built on state-of-the-art microservices that are configured and managed on Ambari. It also has the Hadoop-based big data architecture for elastic scalability and performance. For more information, see Network Performance Insight architecture.

You can derive the following benefits from Network Performance Insight:
Proactive WAN monitoring
Network Performance Insight can test for network issues such as latency and packet loss. Identifies and solves problems before the impact gets noticeable. Understands the network behavior patterns and can help in the following ways:
  • Prevent network outages and slow downs.
  • Detect policy violations and required changes to configuration settings.
  • Monitor congestion with QoS queuing hierarchy.
  • Generate alerts based on user-configured thresholds before an incident occurs.

    Provide predefined and custom threshold settings that help provide alerts on traffic data violations at interface level. You can analyze and correlate this information from highly customizable Network Performance Insight Dashboards.

  • Define and manage IP Grouping for usage-based accounting and billing.
  • Plan the IP routing and peering agreements with the help of Autonomous systems.
  • Make informed decisions based on historical data.
  • Improve enterprise network management to optimize costs and increase organizational productivity.
Micro and macro level management of enterprise networks
Keeps performance, availability, and productivity of networks, applications, and devices as the key focus that results in good user-experience. Network Performance Insight provides these specific monitoring capabilities:
Network performance monitoring

Correlates interfaces with QoS Queue Drops metric value and traffic breakdown by Traffic class. Validates the effectiveness of network QoS policy.

Ensures that WAN capacity is maintained for business-critical applications with policy-based access control.

Reports IP SLA operation results in real time to indicate general user experience degradation and helps the Operations Engineers to understand the impact of network traffic load on overall quality of latency sensitive network services.

Gives insight on the impact of network traffic load on business critical and business irrelevant applications.

Application health monitoring

With the help of advanced Cisco NBAR2 (Next Generation Network-Based Application Recognition), it can detect the applications that consume high network bandwidth.

Identifies the applications in your network without relying only on the port numbers and detects applications latency based on the Application Response Time and Total Application Delay. Control access to non-business relevant applications that consume network bandwidth.

Device health monitoring

SNMP data is supplied as ready-to-use performance packages for Cisco, Juniper, and Huawei devices that is supplied from Performance Metric OOTB Device Support. A single discovery and SNMP polling stack is used to look up and store the data from Tivoli® Network Manager to Network Performance Insight.

At-a-glance visibility into network performance
With exhaustive network visibility, Network Performance Insight helps you identify the highest and least used assets (network, infrastructure, and applications). Navigate from high-level dashboard views to drill-down and pivot to pinpoint the issues from low-level details. It has options for scalable data collection and real-time visibility of data. Built-in visualizations in Network Performance Insight are as follows:
  • Network Performance Overview dashboards
  • NetFlow dashboards
  • On Demand Filtering dashboards
The dashboards and widgets can provide the following capabilities to Network Operations Engineers, Global Operations Managers, and Network Capacity Planners:
  • Operational insights
  • Analytical insights
  • Strategic insights
  • On-demand filtering insights
Fast-tracked troubleshooting and incident management

Improves visibility into network performance to help minimize service degradations and disruptions, and speed up troubleshooting. The usage and trend analysis of the reports remove network bottlenecks, blind spots with seamless navigation among the dashboards and performance monitoring protocols to allow immediate problem resolution.

The clear data points in the reports help to differentiate bandwidth spikes, along with information about congestion in network. Reduced MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution) can improve the ROI of an enterprise.

Root cause analysis and capacity planning
Root cause analysis can help in strategic planning and not only solve the current network issues but also plan for the future expansions and upgrades. Highlights trends in network traffic so that you can plan bandwidth capacity needs. Analyze traffic planning with capacity planning reports.
Partial support for security incident identification
Heightened network bandwidth, unidentifiable devices, and interfaces can lead to suspicion of a security threat to your network. You can correlate a possible security threat with a set of specific KPIs from Network Performance Insight visualizations.