What Is Network Visibility for APM and NPM?

Most everyone in IT has heard about network performance monitoring (NPM) and application performance monitoring (APM) tools. But what are the real benefits? For instance, what kind of information do I really get and is it worth the investment? Also, what about the complexity involved with these types of solutions?

The answer boils down to implementation. Essentially, did you install a visibility architecture first (so that you can optimize the flow of information to APM and NPM tools), or did you just add point solutions for APM and NPM? This answer will determine the effectiveness of your application monitoring solutions.

The Visibility Architecture concept is extremely important because it organizes the flow of information to performance monitoring tools. Without it, you don’t know what the quality and integrity of the input data to the tools is. This visibility architecture delivers an end-to-end infrastructure which enables physical and virtual network, application, and security visibility. Specifically, network packet brokers can be included in the architecture to parse the requisite data needed and distribute that data to one or more application monitoring tools.

Once the network packet brokers are installed, it makes it much easier for the APM and NPM solutions to optimize your performance. In addition to these tools, other capabilities, like application intelligence and proactive network monitoring can be installed as part of the visibility architecture to further increase the range of capabilities.

Here are some example use cases of what you can accomplish when a Visibility Architecture is combined with performance monitoring tools:

In the end, any performance monitoring solution is only as good as the quality of data feeding the tools. Extraneous and duplicate data will affect the ability and speed of monitoring tools to come to an accurate analysis. A few minutes of time to understand your network visibility and the types of blind spots that you have might just be well worth the investment of time.

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