Posts
1.25.19
TCP RTOs: Retransmission Timeouts & Application Performance Degradation
In an effort to rid the world of needless application and network performance slowdowns, we turn to retransmission timeouts (RTOs). What are they and what can you do about them? What Is TCP…
Justin Baker
6.25.13
Tap the Wire Data Inside Your Cisco UCS Environment for IT Operational Intelligence
If you are one of the more than 23,000 organizations that use Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) or are considering it for your environment, this blog's for you. According to IDC's Worldwide…
Justin Baker
5.8.13
ExtraHop Wins Best of Interop 2013 in Las Vegas
IT Operations teams are under the gun. They need to tackle a growing list of new internal and business projects while supporting all the existing applications that keep the business running. It's no…
Justin Baker
2.19.13
How to Answer the SharePoint Monitoring Questions You Care About
Microsoft has sold more than 125 million licenses of its SharePoint collaboration platform to over 65,000 organizations. With SharePoint environments scaling to accommodate more users and more…
Justin Baker
1.23.13
Storage Performance Monitoring: 3 Metrics Needed for Holistic Visibility
The Service Level Agreement is always the first casualty in the war to assign blame. Most IT organizations monitor their applications and infrastructure in an extremely disjointed manner, with each…
Justin Baker
12.19.12
Aberdeen Report: The Value of End-to-End APM and How to Achieve It
"Taking an end-to-end approach to application performance management can seem like the obvious thing to do. But it hasn't been the way that performance management has traditionally worked. In order to…
Justin Baker
11.7.12
Performance Metric of the Month: HTTP Payload Details
For our November performance metric of the month, we're looking at HTTP payloads. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a tremendously important technology layer that supports many critical services…
Justin Baker
10.11.12
Why Visibility Across Tiers Is Important for DBAs
Database administrators (DBAs) are feeling the heat. Database profilers cannot be run continuously in production due to the overhead they impose. Without them, though, DBAs are flying blind. What DBAs…
Justin Baker
9.17.12
Why ExtraHop + Splunk Integration Matters
The new Splunk App for ExtraHop captures real-time metrics that are otherwise difficult or impossible to log. Splunk has made headlines over the past few months for its successful IPO and powerful Big…
Justin Baker
9.12.12
Microsoft's 1024-Bit RSA Key-Size Requirement and Other IT Burdens
This post is written by Cal Jewell, a Senior Technical Trainer at ExtraHop. In June, Microsoft announced that it would release an update blocking the use of RSA keys using less than 1024-bit…
Justin Baker
9.4.12
ExtraHop v3.7 - APM Improvements for Ease of Use and Visualization
We've just released version 3.7 of the ExtraHop system, including important new application performance monitoring functionality that makes IT operations more agile and efficient. Our aim with this…
Justin Baker
8.22.12
Lowering the Cost of Entry for Application Performance Management (APM)
The application performance management (APM) industry is evolving rapidly in response to two intertwined trends: Businesses are placing a greater emphasis on application performance, and IT Operations…
Justin Baker
8.20.12
The 2012 Gartner MQ for APM: What IT Operations Teams Need to Know
Gartner has released its 2012 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) report, highlighting growth in APM spending and a rapidly evolving market. This year's report evaluated…
Justin Baker
8.9.12
TCP: Where the Network Meets the Application, Part 1
This post is written by Eric Thomas, Principal Solutions Architect at ExtraHop Networks. Many organizations struggle to find the right level of instrumentation to monitor the performance of their…
Justin Baker
8.1.12
ExtraHop is Up for a Stevie, the Oscar Award of the Business World
What do you know about The Stevie Awards? Upon their introduction in 2002, the New York Post called them "the business world's own Oscar Awards." The awards' founder, Michael P. Gallagher, conceived…
Justin Baker
7.24.12
Dealing with Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Data Overload, Part 2
Last week, we summarized TRAC Research's Market Insight report, "Improving the Usability of APM Data: Essential Capabilities and Benefits." Read that post here. This week's post lays out one of…
Justin Baker
7.17.12
Dealing with Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Data Overload, Part 1
"You cannot manage what you do not measure" is a truism when it comes to managing application performance. This has led to a "data hoarder" mentality where IT teams install performance agents on every…
Justin Baker
7.2.12
How Much is Too Much? Quest, Dell, and Legacy Application Performance Management Solutions
Quest Software has confirmed rumors that Dell won a bidding war to purchase the company. Dell ended up paying $2.4 billion for Quest. That's a lot of money—more than 55 times Quest's earnings for the…
Justin Baker
6.6.12
Case Study: When Application Performance Is About Efficiency, Not Just Speed
At ExtraHop, we get excited about how our customers are using our network-based application performance management (APM) solution to do some really astonishing things. ExtraHop customers run some of…
Justin Baker
5.3.12
Join ExtraHop at Interop Las Vegas and Citrix Synergy!
Next week will undoubtedly be one of the busiest, most exciting weeks for IT Operations professionals this year. Thousands of IT pros in the Citrix universe will be heading down to San Francisco for…
Justin Baker
4.10.12
Major Nordic Retail Group Axstores Chooses ExtraHop to Ensure Smooth Application Migration
[This post is written by Owen Cole, EMEA Vice President at ExtraHop Networks.] For companies that operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, keeping critical business systems running is non-negotiable…
Justin Baker
4.4.12
Best-of-Breed: A Cost-Effective Alternative to "Death Star APM"
The APM space is expanding and evolving at a rapid pace, leading to older established firms acquiring newer technologies to fill in the gaps in their solutions. As this evolution is certain to…
Justin Baker
2.28.12
From Tech Startup to Tech Powerhouse - Two Key Additions to the ExtraHop Team: Sujal Patel and Eric Scollard
Today, we are delighted to announce two great additions to the ExtraHop team: Sujal Patel and Eric Scollard. Both join ExtraHop from Isilon Systems and bring impressive experience in turning a tech…
Justin Baker
2.20.12
Why Healthcare IT Teams Need Agentless Application Performance Monitoring
Summary: ExtraHop offers a great application performance management solution for the healthcare industry that helps healthcare IT teams efficiently support initiatives such as mobile applications…
Justin Baker
1.18.12
Forrester Application Performance Management Market Overview Report for Q4, 2011
Forrester Research recently published a report on the application performance management (APM) market, titled "Market Overview: Application Performance Management, Q4 2011." Led by Principal Analyst…
Justin Baker
12.15.11
EMA Report: ExtraHop Fills Critical Real-Time Application Performance Monitoring Gaps Left by NetScout Systems
In 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…
Justin Baker
11.30.11
Performance Metric of the Month: Packet Loss, Retransmission Timeouts (RTOs) and Round-Trip Times in Virtualized Systems
Retransmission timeout and round-trip time metrics can reveal virtual packet loss. This month's Performance Metric turns to retransmission timeouts (RTOs) and round-trip times, particularly for…
Justin Baker
10.25.11
Applying Lean Methodology to Application Performance Management
Summary: The ExtraHop system provides the mapping and measuring capabilities needed to continuously improve application performance using lean methodology. Lean methodology enables businesses to…
Justin Baker
10.17.11
RIM BlackBerry Outage Preventable with ExtraHop Database Performance Monitoring
The Guardian reports that Research in Motion's (RIM) three-day outage for its BlackBerry service was caused by faulty networking equipment in its U.K. network operations center, located in Slough. RIM…
Justin Baker
10.7.11
By the power of ExtraHop, I found bugs!
Once IT professionals start using the ExtraHop system to troubleshoot and tune their applications, there’s typically a little bit of euphoria. That’s because ExtraHop’s unique network-based approach…
Justin Baker
9.29.11
Performance Metric of the Month: CIFS Errors
CIFS Errors: The ExtraHop system provides storage performance details not contained in event logs. September's Performance Metric of the Month (PMM) focuses on CIFS errors for networked storage, but…
Justin Baker
9.28.11
Data Storage, Impact by the Numbers, and What It Means for Application Performance Management (APM)
I love statistics—who doesn't? Stats are a great way to identify important trends, behaviors, and market challenges—which is precisely why a recent infographic published on ReadWriteWeb about data…
Justin Baker
9.27.11
Oracle Database Performance Monitoring with ExtraHop: An Attractive Alternative to Agents and Profilers
One of the many advantages of a network-based approach to application performance management is that it requires no host-based instrumentation, which can often impose an onerous amount of overhead on…
Justin Baker
9.19.11
Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and the Five Functional Dimensions of APM
This week saw the release of the Gartner 2011 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring* (APM). In February 2010, Gartner issued its first Magic Quadrant for the APM industry in which it…
Justin Baker
7.12.11
Performance Metric of the Month: PAWS Dropped SYNs and Network Address Translation
In past blog posts, we've talked about performance metrics, such as TCP retransmission timeouts (RTOs) and database performance metrics, which help IT teams solve hard-to-pinpoint issues before they…
Justin Baker
6.2.11
"It's Not My VM—It's the Application": It's Really Virtual Packet Loss
Performance management in virtualized environments is the topic of Gartner analyst Cameron Haight's post, Server Virtualization Performance. Haight notes that during a Gartner client gathering, he…
Justin Baker
3.7.11
Performance Metric of the Month: Retransmission Timeouts (RTOs) and Application Performance Degradation
It's a new year and a great time to make changes for the better. In an effort to rid the world of needless network and application performance slowdowns, we turn to retransmission timeouts (RTOs)…
Justin Baker
9.16.10
ExtraHop in the U.K.
Next week, ExtraHop's Co-founder and President Raja Mukerji will be presenting at the 360 IT Conference in London. The conference is designed to help IT professionals discover how IT infrastructure…
Justin Baker
9.2.10
Getting the Most Out of Your Network Management Investment
In a recent Network World article, titled Top 5 Network Management Investments, Ann Bednarz makes a compelling case for how companies ought to prioritize their network performance management…
Justin Baker
8.18.10
SLA Monitoring: Using Internal SLA's to Improve Application Performance
Most of us in business are familiar with the classic adage: "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." As IT becomes more deeply aligned with the business it supports, the ability to understand…
Justin Baker
8.16.10
Network Timeout, a free web service from ExtraHop Networks, leverages AWS
In case you haven't checked out Network Timeout yet, here's the scoop: NetworkTimeout.com is a community-driven effort that aims to improve access to network- and application-analysis solutions and…
Justin Baker
8.4.10
ExtraHop Makes Root-cause Analysis Easy for Alaska Airlines
If you're just getting back from summer vacation, be sure to check out this feature article written by Beth Schultz in Network World. In it, she details how Alaska Airlines is using the ExtraHop…
Justin Baker
7.29.10
ExtraHop exhibiting at the F5 Summit
We're packing our bags now for next week's F5 Summit in Chicago. According to the local weather reports, it appears that we'll be greeted by "surging humidities," "clusters of thunderstorms," and…
Justin Baker
6.25.10
Visit the ExtraHop booth at Cisco Live!
Next week we'll be exhibiting at Cisco Live, giving demos of the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system, and describing how ExtraHop leverages the Cisco Nexus 1000v line of switches. There…
Justin Baker
6.14.10
ExtraHop Presenting at Morgan Stanley's CTO Summit
We're excited to announce that on June 17th, Jesse and Raja will be presenting at Morgan Stanley's 10th Annual CTO Summit in Palo Alto. Hundreds of companies were nominated to participate in the…
Justin Baker
5.18.10
ExtraHop Selected by Globespan Capital to Present to its CIO Advisory Board
We received some great news a few weeks back: ExtraHop has been selected as one of just three companies to present at Globespan Capital's Bi-Annual Technology Briefing Lunch taking place on May 25th…
Justin Baker
4.28.10
ExtraHop Wins Best of Interop—twice!
We just won not one but two Best of Interop Awards. First we beat out finalists Gigamon and Apposite Technologies in the Network Management, Monitoring and Testing category. Then a few minutes later…
Justin Baker
4.27.10
F5 partners with ExtraHop
In addition to all the Interop news, we also made our partnership with F5 Networks official yesterday morning! This makes sense for so many reasons, including the fact that Jesse and Raja architected…
Justin Baker
4.26.10
We're hitting the ground running at Interop—and launching Network Timeout!
Interop starts today, and we're looking forward to a very busy week. We've got a big contingent here, including most of the management team and quite a few sales and technical sales…
Justin Baker
4.20.10
Interop panel: EMC, CA, and Jesse from ExtraHop
Interop is fast upon us, next week in Las Vegas (April 25–29). Not only are we exhibiting--booth #1275, come by and say hi--but we're also participating in the "booth crawl" from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. on…
Justin Baker
4.15.10
Network Timeout gets nominated for Best of Interop!
We just got some great news: ExtraHop Networks has been selected as a finalist for the Best of Interop awards, in the Best Network Management, Monitoring & Testing category. If you're reading this…
Justin Baker
1.28.10
I like to finger-point at our IT folks
We sent an email to a person in the wrong department at a company we've been talking with. This reply made us smile: There are some commonalities in our work, but as you can see, I don't think I can…
Justin Baker
1.4.10
What Matters Most in 2010
With New Year come new resolutions, and an opportunity to take stock, examine your organization's needs and explore new solutions. Network World came out with an article called the "5 must-have IT…
Justin Baker
12.28.09
The Biggest IT Stories of 2009
It's almost time to wave goodbye to 2009. It was an amazing year for ExtraHop. As for the broader world of IT, 2009 was packed with major news stories that will have significant impact, even years…
Justin Baker
12.9.09
Play the IT Blame Game!
It's time for a little fun. When something goes wrong with the network, or with an application, do you always get the blame? When an app crashes, a server goes down, a database disappears, or…
Justin Baker
12.8.09
VMware Losing Its Grip on the Market?
Came across an interesting survey today on the state of the virtualization market. For the longest time, VMware has enjoy an ironclad lock in this space. That might be changing, according to a survey…
Justin Baker
12.2.09
Network World's Top 10 IT Management Start-ups to Watch
Right on the heels of our end-of-year press release, where we shared our success in unheralded product innovation, triple digit sales growth, strategic funding and sales expansions, we found out…
Justin Baker
11.30.09
L7 Visibility into Your "Middle Boxes"
In any enterprise architecture, there are a lot of "middle boxes". I'm talking about your load balancers, application delivery controllers, firewalls, NAT devices, proxy servers, and increasingly…
Justin Baker
11.6.09
No, We Run at 10 Gb
We were sitting around the video conferencing table for a company all-hands meeting. Raja recounted a story of a recent customer meeting, arranged by a channel partner, it had to be really short to…
Justin Baker
11.6.09
WAN Optimization Considerations
WANOp is increasing popular these days and sometimes gets talked about like it's a panacea to solving performance problems. The reality is WANOp is not well suited to ease all performance pains. In…
Justin Baker
10.28.09
Optimize Application Performance in a Day
Sounds too good to be true? Tune in to our Nov 12th webinar and see for yourself. This 40-minute webinar is hosted by ExtraHop and our partner Gigamon. Raja Mukerji, President of ExtraHop and Lance…
Justin Baker
10.23.09
When Virtual Servers create real headaches
According to a recent CIO Insight survey, server and storage virtualization stay at the top of the IT Spending Priority List, seeing the strongest growth in 2009. Sixty-two percent of companies are…
Justin Baker
9.24.09
When L3 Stats Just Aren't Enough
At ExtraHop, we sometimes talk about L2 and L3 statistics as "table stakes". For a network and application management solution, you need to have visibility into those layers. But by and large, they…
Justin Baker
9.9.09
Fix Application Problems 200% Faster Than Your Competition
When it comes to network and application management, the performance gap between average and best-in-class companies is staggering. How well does your company perform, and what best practices can you…
Justin Baker
8.10.09
Comparing NetScout, NetQoS, OPNET and ExtraHop
We get asked this question a lot, "how do you compare to so and so"? The truth is, the "so and so" we're being compared to are usually great products with some impressive capabilities. But ExtraHop is…
Justin Baker
7.10.09
Separate Marketing Hype from Product Reality
We were in an analyst briefing the other week. It's always good when these things get interactive, and the analyst fires great questions back at you. That shows they're following, they get your story…
Justin Baker
6.18.09
Great Article on New Network Engineer Skill Requirements
Shamus does it again! Great article on the changing requirments for those considering a career in network engineering. Best quote was from Chris Silva, a Forrester research analyst - "For the network…
Justin Baker
6.16.09
Top 10 Tips for Tuning BIG-IP
Webinar Recording Now Posted. Join us for a 30 minute webinar on June 30th - spend 30 minutes with us to double the ROI on your BIG-IP investment. Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are critical…
Justin Baker
6.11.09
When Alerts Actually Become Useful
Any monitoring/systems management product need to have built-in alerting capabilities. Too bad most of them aren't very useful. The tricky thing is knowing what thresholds to set. The truth of the…
Justin Baker
5.27.09
ExtraHop Goes 2.0
Time sure flies when you're having fun. It seems like just yesterday when we came out of stealth and launched the 1.0 version of our Application Delivery Assurance system. Here we are, not quite 6…
Justin Baker
5.15.09
Packet Sniffers on Steroids? Why Would I Want That?
ExtraHop had a great customer advisory board meeting yesterday, this is a semiannual event where we bring together representatives from key customers to share our roadmap, so they can provide feedback…
Justin Baker
5.7.09
Fighting with Your Management Tools and You Don't Even Know It?
IT is really a pretty hard job, like it or not, we seem to take abuses from all directions: management, irate customers on the phone, idiot users etc. But you shouldn't have to put up with additional…
Justin Baker
5.1.09
The Big Internet Brown Out of 2012?
Forget the 2012 Mayan calendar apocalypse, IT has something more real to worry about that year. My co-worker Dave brought this to my attention: a Times Online article cites a Nemertes Research report…
Justin Baker
4.29.09
Transatlantic Latency On Your LAN
I'm constantly amazed at the amount of data we gather at any given moment. And most of the time, so are the customers. Case in point, we have this nifty chart that shows Round Trip Time (RTT) for all…
Justin Baker
4.23.09
Stop Fighting With Your Management Tools
I was in Skagit Valley over the weekend, shooting some photos at the Tulip Festival. My photographic partner in crime works in IT, at a large software company in the Pacific Northwest. The topic…
Justin Baker
4.22.09
Moving Towards the Private Cloud
VMware made a big splash yesterday with the launch of VSphere, the new "cloud operating system". The idea is that any enterprise IT department can leverage VSphere to build a private cloud and scale…
Justin Baker
4.16.09
Vendor Wars Episode II: A New Hope
As a "sequel" to yesterday's Vendor Chronicle's post, I'm going to tell a story about what happens when a client is stuck in the middle between multiple vendors. This is when the finger pointing…
Justin Baker
4.15.09
Vendor Chronicles Part I or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Saved $1M
The relationship between any IT department and its vendors can get tricky at times. As is the case with any relationship, things are smoothest when your interests are aligned. However that's not…
Justin Baker
4.14.09
ExtraHop Announces $5.1M in Series A Funding
At ExtraHop, we celebrate success. Every customer win gets rung in, with our special bell, by the MVP for that deal. Today we announced $5.1M in Series A funding, led by Madrona, with participation…
Justin Baker
3.31.09
I come to work daily to defend my job
Had a really fun customer meeeting the other day, the participants were your typical IT geek/gurus, but with an extra dash of funny. The "blamestorm" part of our customer presentation really resonated…
Justin Baker
3.27.09
Speed Up Your Cloud
In a buzzword heavy industry, Cloud Computing has definitely garnered more than its fair share of attention lately. According to a recent InformationWeek article, more than 50% of companies…
Justin Baker
3.25.09
Survey Says: No Business Case for IPv6, We'll Use NATs instead
"We surveyed 100 people, and the top answers are on the board." Ok, so the Internet Society (ISOC) didn't really say that, but they did survey their members regarding IPv6 and found that "specific…
Justin Baker
3.16.09
Unified Computing Demands Unified Management
The big news in the networking world today is of course Cisco's Unified Computing announcement. We applaud any kind of innovation that aims to make the lives of IT easier, and given Cisco's heft in…
Justin Baker
3.12.09
When Your CFO Can't Email
What happens if your CFO can't send emails because Microsoft Exchange just stopped responding? Given how important email communication is to any modern enterprise, I'm sure this was beyond frustrating…
Justin Baker
3.3.09
The Management Impact of Virtualization
As Raja stated in his New Year Resolution for Network Engineers post, Virtualization is the new hotness (for very valid reasons), but with it comes new challenges. The interaction of the…
Justin Baker
2.25.09
To Nagle or Not to Nagle, That is the Question
In our work with customers, we've come across the question of Nagling quite a few times. When we show network engineers that they have a relatively high number of Nagle Delays, it's not unusual to…
Justin Baker
2.20.09
The Curious Case of Packet Sniffers
In this post, we're going to talk a little about Packet Sniffers. (The title is of course an homage to the upcoming Oscar night, where its namesake is likely to go down as the biggest loser in the…
Justin Baker
2.12.09
Replay of an IT Support Incident - ExtraHop In the Wild
A fun part of the ExtraHop customer engagement model is something we call the "Show-n-Tell". For any customer evaluation, we'll install the box (a 15-minute process), let the box "soak-in" for a few…
Justin Baker
2.9.09
ExtraHop: Like Google Earth for Your Network
ExtraHop got some hometown coverage in the Seattle Times today. In an article titled: Like Google Maps for Your Network (yes, I realize this is slightly different from my title, but personally I think…
Justin Baker
2.6.09
New Year Resolutions for Network Engineers
Yes, yes, I know, this post is coming a bit late. Ahem, didn't we just celebrate a chinese new year? Better late than never, right? In order to put together this resolution list for our favorite…
Justin Baker
2.3.09
Do you know the 7 Deadly Sins of Network Management?
Well, do you? Here's a teaser, some choice quotes from other IT professionals: "By avoiding Sin #1, we cut down troubleshooting time by 60% on the new application roll out" - Dir. of App Support…
Justin Baker
1.12.09
CIP Firewall
Jack is back, and looks to be better than ever before. (Yes, I'm a die-hard fan) But seriously, were you also annoyed with the sheer number of times the "CIP Firewall" was mentioned in last night's…
Justin Baker
12.22.08
A Network Management Revolution - Fueled by Faster Processors and Cheaper Storage
In the past decade, processing speed and storage capacity have continued to increase in magnitude and decrease in price so rapidly that every couple of years we need to reassess what is feasible and…
Justin Baker
12.17.08
An iPhone for the Holidays?
IT workers are some of the most mobile members of the workforce, you're running around troubleshooting, putting out fires, and definitely not in front of your desk all day. The ever-resourceful Denise…
Justin Baker
12.15.08
War Stories or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New Application
I'm starting a series of posts that I'll call "War Stories" to share some of the more interesting from-the-trenches stories I come across. Working effectively to troubleshoot problems in IT takes a…
Justin Baker