SecurActive Performance Vision's blog

Please have a look at this screencast, which shows you how to diagnose an application slowdown due to a network congestion, in less than 2 minutes.

For more information, please visit: http://www.securactive.net

Here is a video introduction to Performance Vision for network and application performance diagnostic:
 

 
For more information, please visit: www.securactive.net

Please have a look at this screencast, which shows you how to diagnose a server response time issue from the dashboard to a specific conversation, in less than 2 minutes.

For more information, please visit: http://www.securactive.net

Here is a question that we had recently: in which direction should we search to identify the source of the problem in the following table and solve it?

First comments:

We immediatly notice that the SYNs do not end up in a TCP connection. Thus, we can conclude that SYNACKs and/or ACKs are not issued or are dropped.
At the worst, there could correspond to machines infected by a virus trying to spread through the network!

This first observation turned out to be wrong…

Effectively, this is impossible because there are also … Continue Reading

Virtualization is now a standard practice in IT infrastructure to reduce costs (hardware and administration) and develop redundant server infrastructure more easily.

Cloud deployments are not yet so common, but these projects have similar goals, with similar consequences on performance and network monitoring.

 Private & public Cloud architectures will also be very attractive:

• They offer you to reduce costs,

• They offer a simpler and cost effective path to a more robust and redundant IT.

The most common cloud deployments take the form of SaaS (software as a service) or cloud infrastructure purchased by software vendors to offer SaaS.
Virtualization and cloud solutions are … Continue Reading

Virtualization / Cloud Pre-migration management

You probably had the experience of applications which ran well on the LAN and were barely usable from a remote WAN site. In the past that drove many organizations to use thin clients architecture or to look into solutions that could reduce the gap created by the WAN (compression, prioritization). Migrating to the cloud means adding a piece of network between your users and the cloud services (storage, servers). It is not free of impact on your users and the performance they experience. Before implementing, you may want to consider a certain number of points … Continue Reading

Migration management

Who has migrated, who’s not

One of the first questions, which come around while migrating an application, is the level of progress made in the migration: how many of my users are already using the new platform; the second one is certainly when can I assert that no one is still using the old one.

In parallel, you certainly want to keep an eye on the performance rate of both your network and servers to check that they maintain the same level of performance, even though the overall load is increasing.

All this can easily be surveyed with a Network … Continue Reading

Ongoing performance management

Challenge 1: you do not know where your servers are…

Whether in the case of a cloud deployment or virtualized infrastructure, you will not have a clear visibility of where your servers are located at one point of time.

In the case of a cloud deployment, first, you probably do not know where the servers are physically (and network-wise) located and, second, you probably do not have any administrative access to them. This means that you have limited control on their configuration. The only sure thing you know is through which gateway your users access them. … Continue Reading

There are many ways to approach Application Performance Management; depending who is looking for the diagnostic capability and what the exact objective is, different approaches are possible:

• Network based APM
• Agent based APM
• End User Experience Monitoring

These methods have different advantages and drawbacks.
Network based Application Performance Monitoring
This approach consists in capturing network traffic and analyzing application exchanges to provide statistics on network performance, server response time. From this analysis performed from layer 4 to 7, we can:

-          derivate an index of the end user experience,

-          understand how applications are delivered through the network to all users by capturing traffic in the datacenters,

-          provide … Continue Reading

Is the treatment you execute on a flow neutral from a performance point of view?
Well… it depends how fast it is performed. If you have the article on the drivers of network latency (http://blog.securactive.net/?p=2857), you will probably see what we refer to. The processing job performed by network devices may not be neutral.

Here is a concrete example of a network connection which gets encrypted for security reasons. Here is what we could observe from a performance point … Continue Reading