Network Performance Management: The Network is Not Down

Executive Summary

Networks are critical to enterprises. They are used for communications and also provide access to applications that power sales, manufacturing, human resources, facilities management, finance, and decision support. If the network is not available or performance is poor, it impacts productivity and business processes.

In the past, network performance management consisted of monitoring whether devices were working or not working. Problems were addressed with simple solutions -- more bandwidth, servers, memory or processors, or faster, denser disk arrays for storage. Today, these approaches are expensive, and they often fail to address the root cause of problems.