5View™ Service Data Manager

To adequately support today’s business operations, a company’s critical applications and services must operate at peak performance from the data center to the end-user over the converged IP network. Satisfactory performance and reliability requires that these applications—and all of the components that deliver them—work properly all the time. To that end, monitoring network performance alone is no longer sufficient. Service providers and enterprises must focus on building “application awareness” into their service offerings and performance management practices. This entails visibility into service utilization (down to the application or end-user level), an understanding of quality from the end-user experience perspective, and clear insight into the interdependencies and traffic between application components in today’s complex, multi-tiered, and virtualized data centers.

However, in providing such visibility, providers face the challenge of collecting, managing, and presenting complex and varied service usage data—that is, the data related to the communication between a source and destination for any IP-based exchange. The level of difficulty, cost and time associated with this endeavor are all influenced by some important requirements and considerations that must be addressed, including:

• The need to manage and monitor multiple business services on the shared network—in an efficient and unified manner
• A scalable and cost-effective method of collecting many types of service data records from multiple enterprise customers
• A way to easily manage the segmentation of data by customer or business unit and provide accurate service/application monitoring and reporting
• A way to process the massive amounts of data without losing the details or sacrificing performance
• The ability to support proprietary data record formats from various equipment vendors and standards bodies (e.g., ITU, IEEE and IETF)

Providers that use limiting or multiple tools to manage the different kinds of service usage data may lack visibility into the customer experience data details once the usage data is aggregated. It can also be costly and inefficient for them to deploy probes for every single customer, and manually intensive for them to manage these multiple deployments.

5View™ Service Data Manager offers the robust, carrier-class application performance management platform and feature set needed to provide service providers and large enterprises with real-time visibility and analysis for a variety of service usage data types. Service Data Manager takes the large volumes of data collected by various sources, such as the multi-tenant 5View™ NetFlow SP appliance or the 5View™ Applications appliance, and processes, aggregates, stores and then presents the customer-specific data on a common platform. The detailed application traffic service quality and performance statistics offered by Service Data Manager’s various options such as 5View™ Application Usage Manager and Application Response Manager, furnish network and IT operations teams with information crucial for troubleshooting, service/application usage analysis, traffic engineering, capacity planning, and ensuring quality of service and quality of experience.