In an era of mobility, unified IP communications, and cloud services, the sheer volume and diversity of data traversing an enterprise network is growing wildly.  Services are rapidly expanding in both scope and complexity, demanding intense focus and effort from network administrators as they attempt to ensure quality enterprise application and communication service performance at all times.  This requires a detailed understanding of which applications are active at any given time and how each is being affected by network connectivity, congestion, and configuration.

LiveAction from ActionPacked Networks is designed to do just that.  A sophisticated application-aware network performance management and QoS (quality of service) control tool, LiveAction enables IT professionals to optimize end-user experience and business application delivery by effectively managing application-aware network performance. What separates this solution from similar network management tools, however, is its unique visual approach to troubleshooting, monitoring, and control.

LiveAction accelerates troubleshooting and resolution of application and network performance issues by deliveringan easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) that presents the network in a way that makes sense to IT managers.  The solution offers an intuitive visualization of network devices and services, including physical and local topographies, all the way down to individual interfaces, and is able to visually depict the behavior of information exchange at each stage of a packets journey.

In this way, performance metrics and routing configurations are presented to administrators in a way that’s immediately understandable, and, more importantly, actionable.  Indeed, LiveAction goes a step further than other solutions and allows network engineers create, edit, and apply QoS policies for Cisco (News - Alert) routers and switches directly from the LiveAction interface, making the entire process of monitoring, accessing, and configuring extremely simple and cost-effective..

At its most basic, LiveAction is NetFlow/IP Fix big data analytics presented in a natural, graphical manner.  The solution aggregates end-to-end information regarding packet routing, QoS behavior, IP addresses, DSCP values, byte rates, packet loss, trunk interfaces, port channels, VLAN associations, spanning tree connections, bandwidth usage and more, and visualizes it into easy to interpret network diagrams, charts, and graphs.  Using this information, engineers can easily identify reachability problems, routing loops, asymmetric paths, bottlenecks, and other configuration issues that can affect performance quality.  What’s more, the solution allows users to tag (News - Alert) and search for devices, paths, locations, and subnets and narrow down traffic by protocol and or classification (e.g. Skype, Video, Bit torrent)  to make management even easier.

Of course, it’s just as important to be proactive as it is to be reactive when it comes to network management.  That is why LiveAction supports Cisco IP SLA generation of synthetic traffic for testing metrics like latency, loss, jitter, and mean opinion core (MOS).  Moreover, LiveAction keeps a real-time record of performance data, allowing users to revisit past issues and examine network configuration and behavior as it happened, to glean lessons for the future.

It is this combination of visualization and action that makes LiveAction the ideal tool for network management.  Thus, companies looking to keep up with network complexity and demand would do well to turn to ActionPacked Network.