Application performance monitoring is the process that monitors and controls the performance of an organization’s mission-critical software applications to ensure both a business’ and end-user’s expectations are being met. Many companies use application performance monitoring solutions to reduce organizational costs, enhance security, and, of course, help optimize network and application performance.

Application performance monitoring can determine the speed in which transactions are being completed or delivered to the end user through a specific network and/or data infrastructure. There are several products and solutions that companies deploy to access and gain visibility into their networks, thus reducing time spent troubleshooting the network and applications, decreasing time spent managing network design implementations, and lowering enforcement of network usage policies.

Some of these tools and devices are:

·         Network Test Access Points (TAPs)

·         Data Aggregation Tools

·         Data Access, Bypass and Physical Layer Matrix Switches

Network taps, which range from 10/100 Ethernet to 10 Gigabit, are designed to access the data flowing across a computer network or to monitor the traffic between two points in a network. Once a tap is implemented, the network can be monitored without interfering with the network itself.

Data aggregation tools allow organizations to combine multiple network segments into one output of data, limiting the amount of tools necessary to monitor multiple networks. This, of course, saves costs on deployment and continuing maintenance and licensing fees. For example, a 10 Gigabit link aggregation tap can combine full duplex data from one 10 Gigabit network tap into one or more streams of data.

As a networking hardware appliance, a data access switch delivers an array of application performance monitoring tools that provide access to traffic from a large number of network links to aggregate monitoring traffic from several links, regenerate traffic to multiple tools, pre-filter traffic to offload tools, and lead traffic from port mappings. Meanwhile, physical layer matrix switches provide increased network visibility to accelerate problem resolution, decrease downtime, and boost enterprise productivity and ROI.

Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell