Gaining Application Awareness

Gaining application awareness and in turn making your network organization and network management more applications aware takes methodical planning. IT organizations need to ensure that the tools that they aquire to analyze application performance can utilize a wide rand of sources for management data.

A network organization is applications aware if it has a good understanding of how the network communication is impacting the company's key applications. A key component of becoming applications aware is the ability to identify the applications that are running on the network.

A second component of becoming applications aware is the ability to track and report on a wide range of relevant metrics, such as utilization, availability, and response time. It is important that the network operations group have access to these metrics on a real time bases to be able to troubleshoot problems.It is also important that the network engineering group have access to these metrics on a historical basis to be able to perform functions such as capacity planning and network design.

Source of Management Data:

• Standard SNMP MIB Monitoring- the most elementary management data comes from monitoring the SNMP MIBs (Simple Network Management Protocol Management Information Bases) on network devices such as routers and switches.
  
  
• NetFlow- is a Cisco IOS software feature and also the name of a Cisco protocol for collecting IP traffic information, it represents a more advanced source of management data than SNMP MIBs.
  
  
• Probes- the most sophisticated and complete class of management data comes from probes that are specifically designed to capture detailed application traffic information, these probes provide application visibility and response time metrics from all aspects of the infrastructure and provide insight into a wide range of applications.

It is easy to say that all network organizations are under pressure to become more application aware and to optimize their networks, the difficult part is figuring out how to respond to that pressure.

Successful IT organizations realize that these tradeoffs will always exist and build their approach to applications awareness on the assumption that they will be using a variety of sources of management data.