NetForecast Services

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The NetForecast team has decades of experience helping enteprises understand and improve the performance of networked applications. We work with clients to determine the application performance needs of their business, and to determine whether the end-user experience delivered meets those needs. We analyze how applications behave over the network, and how an application’s performance profile—in conjunction with the performance of servers and the network itself—affects the end-user experience.

NetForecast delivers three primary services to enterprise clients: application performance management (APM) best practices benchmarking, application profile baseline analysis, and network performance baseline analysis. These services can be augmented by custom consulting as circumstances dictate.

NetForecast provides custom consulting that is tailored to the customer’s specific needs. No two customers are the same and therefore no two projects are the same. We develop a statement of work (SOW) that describes what we will do and the deliverables. The SOW is written in a collaborative process with the customer to assure that the work will meet the costumers’ specific needs. NetForecast then delivers the work defined in the SOW under a fixed price contract.

The customer always knows what will be delivered at what price. There is no risk of price increases during a NetForecast engagement.

APM Best Practices Benchmarking Service

Learn how well you deliver APM quality relative to your peers. See your rankings against more than 1000 other companies.

A silo mentality pervades many enterprises, causing network, application, and business professionals to become so focused on their own tasks that they do not see the big APM picture and what their role in it should be. The result is that many enterprises experience finger pointing and confusion that impedes rather than improves application performance. In the absence of thoughtfully formulated enterprise-wide APM processes aimed at understanding, measuring, communicating, and linking application performance to business needs, enterprise employees continue to work to cross purposes resulting in poor application performance outcomes.

 

For many years NetForecast has been surveying enterprises about their application performance management practices. We have amassed detailed benchmark data on more than 1,000 enterprises. We draw on our experience and a rich database of best practices information to help enterprises improve performance management practices and results. The benchmarks are derived from answers to questions enterprise IT managers and stakeholders provide in an online survey created and administered by NetForecast.

Once the survey is completed, NetForecast analyzes the results and summarize its findings in a briefing. The results include:

  • Your performance management benchmarking results
  • Your rankings compared to the industry as a whole
  • Gap analysis highlighting areas of weakness
  • Recommendations for improvement

The results also show the distinction, if any, between application performance quality as experienced by your managers and practitioners.

Deliverable

  • Custom benchmarking survey
  • Benchmarking results presented in a PowerPoint presentation with recommendations
  • Support materials describing the NetForecast APM best practices methodology

 

Benefits

  • The better an enterprises APM practice, the better its application performance results  will be
  • NetForecast has benchmarked enterprise APM best practices for the last four years and consistently found that high marks for best APM practices correlate very closely with fewer performance problems as well as faster problem discovery and resolution times.
  • According to NetForecast's latest APM best practices benchmark survey, enterprises with APM best practice benchmark scores above six on a ten-point scale (with ten the best) experience 75% better results in critical areas than their counterparts with scores under five.

Application Profile Baseline Analysis

You can’t manage the performance of an application you don’t understand.

Rolling out a critical new application with insufficient knowledge about how it will perform in your network environment can be risky. If the application performs poorly, it can prevent application adoption, and jeopardize important business initiatives.

 

NetForecast profiles and creates a baseline of the performance characteristics of your application. To accomplish this, NetForecast first gathers detailed data on site about how the application operates on your network. Application profiles are typically gathered by attaching a network monitor to a network path that carries the application traffic. This is done using a network tap or spanning/mirroring a port on an existing switch. NetForecast then captures the packets for each application task generated by a user. We also capture network traffic generated by related background tasks.

Based upon the application profile and other performance parameters that impact the user experience, NetForecast then builds a traffic model to predict application responsiveness as seen by a user. NetForecast also projects aggregate traffic demands of the application under a variety of deployment scenarios. The scenarios describe deployment alternatives defined by variables such as geographic location, user uptake, application functional changes, technical alternatives, user interface changes, etc. NetForecast analyzes the scenarios to determine how they affect the infrastructure and network requirements.

NetForecast documents the results of the application baseline analysis in the form of a PowerPoint presentation delivered during a conference call.

Deliverable

  • Presentation of the application profile baseline data

Benefits

  • Baseline the performance of an existing application in order to optimize its performance by compensating for any design flaws
  • By understanding an application’s performance before it is rolled out into a production network, an enterprise avoids the risk of a new application failing because performance does not meet the needs of the business
  • The enterprise learns the proper APM methodology to perform such analysis in house so you no longer need outside assistance

Network Performance Baseline Analysis

See detailed end-to-end views of the performance your network really delivers.

Network application and user behavior is in a never-ending state of flux as new network-based applications and activities gain traction while old ones morph or fall by the wayside, and network users are continually added and change locations. This makes it hard for network managers to understand, predict, and improve network performance to ensure that it meets the evolving needs of the business.

NetForecast uses a proprietary system of measurement devices and cloud-based service to gather data about the performance of the network over time and create a baseline of key performance metrics. NetForecast then analyzes the data and summarizes the findings in a written report.

The objective of this service is to understand how the current network operates. NetForecast installs a small appliance at your data center or an important office. The appliance is non-intrusive, generates an extremely low level of traffic, and continually collects key performance indicators to key LAN and/or WAN destinations. In most installations, the test appliance is connected to a dedicated switch port so it has no access to customer traffic. The collected data is used to make informed decisions on the current state of the network and what changes are needed to improve current performance or what changes need to be made in order to support new services.

NetForecast collects network data for an extended period, after which we aggregate and analyze the data and document our findings in a written report and PowerPoint briefing. The path statistics include the following to each measured remote location:

  • Effective bandwidth
  • Bandwidth consumed
  • Latency
  • Packet loss
  • Jitter

Deliverable

  • A written report in PDF form

Benefits

  • The baseline performance report enables an enterprise to understand how its network is performing and to determine if it is meeting current needs
  • Subsequent performance data can then be compared to the baseline to see how performance changes over time
  • Continued comparison to the baseline enables an enterprises to highlight issues, and to determine if efforts to improve performance are getting the needed results