Anyone who has tracked the network and application performance monitoring space over the past few years knows that User Experience is a hot topic. But what does it really mean? Understanding, click-for-click, what the users are doing, how long they have to wait, whether they are experiencing error messages, web pages that fail to load properly, or other connectivity issues are some of the elements that can positively and negatively impact User Experience. With mission-critical corporate applicat...

Business Critical IT Current and reliable data is a crucial for making solid strategic and operational decisions. This data is the foundation for budgeting, forecasting, analyzing, reporting and lastly improving your business. Intelligent solutions are necessary to drive cost reduction, enhance resiliency and raise user experience. Solutions must work seamlessly across enterprises as well as business units. Three Solutions - One software StableNet® incorporates Fault Management, Performance Mana...

Are you are planning to implement new IT projects such as data center consolidation, server virtualization, cloud computing, or perhaps adding new applications on the network?  Do you understand exactly how these upgrades will affect the existing applications and the user experience?  What strategy are you going to use to ensure application performance is not compromised?  It is imperative that you understand how each of the components can affect overall application performance. A...

Over the last couple of years, the growth of IP-based video communtications and IP videoconferencing has explodied due to the the substantial increase of work from remote locations. Video communications are expected to be smooth. Network teams need to be prepared, as video brings several unique challenges. This article will explore key video requirements and monitoring strategies to ensure the technology meets user expectations. Managing in Real Time The primary challenge differentiating managem...

Xplornet Communications, Canada's largest rural-focused broadband provider, has completed the acquisition of the high speed internet business of Full Throttle Networks in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Full Throttle operates a fixed wireless network providing broadband access service to over 1,600 residential and commercial customers in Winnipeg and surroundi...

Telecommunications operators, managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprise corporations, can simulate synthetic real-time communications, between the first to last hop, and every hop in between, of a network delivery path in order to determine the actual Next Hop Performance (NHP). Using Raspberry Pi hardware with Infosim® StableNet® unified management system allows for a cost effective agent technology to measure network perfromance Types of Use So let us take a look at some of the...

If you’re implementing IPTV, it’s important to know what metrics to monitor to ensure the transmission of high quality video. Managing performance entails more than tracking response time. Let’s look at the key metrics for managing IPTV in the following table: Performance AreaMetricDescriptionIPTV Service MetricsQoEVideo quality of experience measured via Media Delivery Index (MDI), most often displayed as two numbers separated by a colon: delay factor (DF) and the media loss rate (MLR)Packet lo...

Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, Francois-Philippe Champagne, yesterday issued a statement regarding Rogers Communications' proposed takeover of Shaw Communications and its subsidiary Freedom Mobile, in which he indicated that at least some of Freedom's cellular spectrum licences would need to be divested as a condition of mer...

The newly released IOTA software version 2.2.2 includes the following new features: Added traffic analysis support for IEEE 802.1ad (QinQ) traffic It is now possible to filter traffic based on the outer VLAN tag of QinQ frames. This improves the versatility of IOTA, as it can now capture and analyze this type of traffic without the need for additio...

Chances are you’ve seen Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) but didn’t know it. Different types of IPTV are popping up in our daily lives ranging from Video-On-Demand to being greeted by pre-recorded video messages at the gas pump or ATM. And many businesses are adopting IPTV to broadcast live or on-demand video content to employees, partners, customers, and investors. But what does this mean for the network team? In this article we’ll outline IPTV basics and focus on primary management challenges and b...

How does an IT team ensure accurate and complete visibility? Obtaining comprehensive visibility into network performance requires not only looking at the network and application, but digging into infrastructure health and performance. Solutions providing this view typically utilize two different approaches: agent or agentless. Selecting the best method for your team requires understanding the options and selecting the solution that integrates well with your existing resources. In this article, w...

Seamless monitoring of network traffic is critically important for enterprise network and security administrators: it lies at the very foundation of network threat detection and remediation. Regrettably, packet duplication has commonly been an undesirable side-effect of network traffic monitoring. Packet duplication produces redundant information i...

Security cameras and alarm systems monitor your buildings, offices, streets, but who monitors your networks? Watch the replay of the Live Webinar "IOTA and Cybersecurity" where Profitap discussed how IOTA can be the best entry point to monitor your network performance. IOTA gives detailed network traffic visibility to critical applications and data...

Canada's Xplornet Communications has announced a plan to deliver affordable fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) internet to 200,000 homes and businesses in rural communities across Ontario. The move forms part of Xplornet's commitment announced last year to invest CAD500 million (USD399 million) by 2025 in deploying fibre and 5G fixed wireless access to meet ...

Network Visibility Dashboards Save Time When mired in KPIs and data analysis, it's easy to forget WHY we have networks but it is important to remember they are the backbone of business that help us deliver services and products. There is a way to rise above the KPI and data debacle – executive dashboards. In this "Benefits of Executive Dashboards –...

You've got massive volumes of data and traffic flowing in and out of your network, plus numerous applications to keep running. It's critical to your bottom line. That's why you can't settle for only partial visibility. Anything less than the full picture and you risk disastrous consequences that can increase costs, cause unexpected outages, delay t...

Your network is more than an information delivery system. It's the heartbeat of your business. Don't let performance problems spoil your users' experience. Active monitoring provides advantages you can't get from the traditional reactive approach. It provides the intelligence you need to: Validate performance before deploying new infrastructure or ...

As networks grow more complex the cost to maintain them frequently increases as well. This isn't always necessary. Ensuring that all traffic on your network is processed efficiently is a simple — but effective — way to minimize cost. For example, some organizations purchase additional monitoring and security tools because the existing tools are ove...

The proper network Management tools allows you to follow these 6 simple tips. This will help you stay ahead of network probelms, and if a problem does occurs you will have the data to be able to analyze the problem.   Troubleshoot sporadic issues with the right equipment  The most irksome issues are often sporadic and require IT teams to wait for the problem to reappear or spend hours recreating the issue. With retrospective network analysis (RNA) solutions, it's possible to elimi...

Cloud by definition, tend to obscure things. As companies continue to move business-critical applications to the cloud, you may lose visibility into cloud traffic. A recent survey of cloud operations professionals revealed: 87 percent feared the cloud was obscuring security threats95 percent believed the cloud delayed the identification and resolut...