BlogIn a new white paper released yesterday, distinguished EMA Managing Research Director and former NetScout Vice President Jim Frey documents the value many enterprise IT shops have found in adding top-down, real-time application performance monitoring to their existing NetScout deployments. As Frey elaborates in the report, a majority of Fortune 500 enterprise IT organizations rely on packet-based NetScout Systems products to monitor network performance from L2 to L4 and perform forensic investigations on the root cause of problems. However, to get the real-time application-oriented performance monitoring that is so critical for 
today's highly complex IT environments, many IT teams are finding great value in deploying the ExtraHop network-based application performance management (APM) solution in parallel with NetScout.
» Download the White Paper here.
Most IT organizations today recognize that their value to the business lies in ensuring optimum application performance. As a result, these organizations need to find the right mix of technologies to help them effectively manage the performance of business-critical applications. The new EMA report includes interviews with three IT teams that have found the right combination using ExtraHop and NetScout: a large investment services firm, a mid-size financial transaction clearinghouse, and a high-tech manufacturer:
- The global investment services organization maintains web-based applications as the primary touchpoints for its customers. If those applications experience problems, there is an immediate and significantly negative impact to the customer experience and bottom line. To ensure everything runs smoothly, the company's associate director of network management says it has built a monitoring group that often needs to bring the network and application developers together when an issue arises. For this team, ExtraHop provides the high-level dashboard view that gives them the ability to spot potential situations across the entire organization, while the NetScout system is used to perform deep analysis, particularly when trying to do historical forensics.
- The large financial transaction clearinghouse has deployed ExtraHop appliances and NetScout InfiniStreams on the same links within two datacenters. It uses the ExtraHop solution to quickly triage and troubleshoot application performance problems and the NetScout solution as a backup when deep packet-based forensics is necessary. As the company's IT team leader notes, "ExtraHop is like the CT scan, giving us a quick view of the overall landscape. When we need to go deep, the NetScout system is the place to go."
- The high-tech manufacturer puts a priority on its communications and ERP applications. In the words of its infrastructure manager, "We were looking for ways to make the network team more directly relevant to supporting our key applications, such as Oracle. The ExtraHop system does this really well, giving us great overall traffic visibility into the data center and graphing/displaying it in a single consolidated view. If the problem is in the application layer, such as SQL errors, we can find that and isolate it directly within the ExtraHop system. If the problems are deeper, we turn to the NetScout tools."
You can read the Enterprise Management Associates white paper by downloading it here: Multi-Layer Performance Management: Co-Deploying ExtraHop Networks and NetScout Systems Solutions.
To find out more about the unique network-based APM approach of the ExtraHop system, visit http://www.extrahop.com/products/.
