– Jesse Rothstein, CEO at ExtraHop (www.extrahop.com), says:
The weight of the enterprise rests on IT, and complexity is spiraling out of control. IT manages an increasing number of geographically distributed applications and infrastructure with so many moving parts that something nearly always is broken or degraded. The widespread adoption of new technologies, such as server virtualization, network attached storage, and cloud computing, provide greater flexibility and perhaps even cost savings, but new layers of management and complexity are added as well. New strategic initiatives and regulatory-compliance issues make the situation even less tenable.
A hodgepodge of legacy management tools, including packet sniffers, SNMP pollers, NetFlow collectors, and custom performance agents, have been thrown at these problems for decades but are lagging further and further behind. While the business expects flawless management of extremely complex environments, IT teams equipped with obsolete, manual tools are losing the battle.
IT infrastructure and applications will not become simpler. New technology, like the agentless real-time transaction analysis performed by the ExtraHop system, is required to keep pace with future demands.
The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is a passive network appliance built to ensure that business-critical transactions do not fail.
The ExtraHop system combines the troubleshooting capabilities of Network Performance Managers with the superior application-level visibility of User Experience Monitors. Performing real-time analysis of application transactions across the network, Web, database, and storage tiers, the ExtraHop system accelerates troubleshooting efforts and proactively warns of potential problems.
The Benefit for Data Center/IT Managers
IT is at the heart of the modern enterprise. When business-critical transactions fail, revenue is lost and the company brand is damaged, negatively impacting the company’s ability to attract and retain customers. In most cases, intermittent slowdowns and failures go unreported and undiagnosed.
The ExtraHop system performs sophisticated network-traffic analysis to ensure that business-critical transactions do not fail, protecting our customers from lost customers, revenue, or reputation. While many tools rely on legacy technologies, such as NetFlow collection, SNMP polling, custom performance agents, or active service checks, the ExtraHop system performs full-stream reassembly and full-content analysis to extract and archive valuable performance and health metrics in a real-time datastore.
Traditional network and application monitoring tools are very expensive and often difficult to setup, tune, and maintain. The ExtraHop system, on the other hand, is extremely easy to deploy as a drop-ship product without requiring companies to fly in support teams for the installation process. What’s more, it can be up and running in a matter of hours, opposed to weeks or even months! The ExtraHop system is also massively scalable, delivering end-to-end, real-time, agentless visibility across networks, applications, databases, and storage arrays, and providing trend-based alerting and proactive early warning for potential problems.
ExtraHop Networks also offers a free web service that allows sophisticated analysis of network packet captures—Network Timeout (www.networktimeout.com). Network Timeout helps IT professionals analyze packet captures for advanced performance tuning and accelerated troubleshooting, with L2–L7 visibility across the network, web, database, and storage tiers.
Registered users can upload as many packet captures as they’d like, analyze outputs using the rich web-based user interface, and share the resulting health and performance metrics with other community members for input and discussion on the Network Timeout forum.
Powered by the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system, Network Timeout is a community-driven effort that aims to improve access to network- and application-analysis solutions and build a broad technical knowledge base among IT professionals.
