Revolutionary Network and Application Management Platform Speeds Troubleshooting, Performance Tuning, and Capacity Planning for Today's Enterprise
SEATTLE, Washington – December 9, 2008 — ExtraHop Networks, Inc., the first network management company to deliver true application visibility, today announced the general availability of the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system, a next-generation network-management platform that provides a truly holistic view of the entire network landscape. Unlike other application and network-management tools currently available in the market, ExtraHop delivers full application and network visibility with zero agents, zero configuration, and zero overhead."Operations teams today are experiencing a painful knowledge gap - lacking a clear and concise understanding of how applications are delivered across highly distributed, increasingly virtualized infrastructures. While snapshots are possible, constant change makes accuracy an exceedingly difficult objective, and the result is long, drawn-out troubleshooting cycles and sub-par planning," said Jim Frey, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "Most management tools do their best to bridge the gap between 'top-down' and 'bottom-up', but fall short.
ExtraHop brings an innovative new approach by revealing and analyzing rich application layer details from the network perspective. Combined with their highly scalable architecture, ExtraHop is in position to deliver long-needed relief for optimizing performance, reducing cost, and streamlining operations."
Traditional application- and network-management tools have been around for more than two decades with few advancements in recent years. Most products provide either a telescopic (high-level) or microscopic (bits-and-bytes) view, missing out on much of the crucial information in the middle. The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system goes far beyond current monitoring practices, and takes a fundamentally different approach towards application and network management. By deeply examining all application streams and transactions that traverse the network, the ExtraHop system enables IT organizations to see the big network picture while providing them with the information to troubleshoot at the most granular level.
All the Visibility, None of the Configuration Headaches
Collectively, companies large and small spend billions of dollars on application- and network-management tools every year. Yet despite this massive investment, many monitoring tools end up as shelfware, leaving IT staff with little relevant information for troubleshooting their most persistent and challenging problems. Many monitoring tools fail to deliver meaningful ROI without significant upfront resource investment because the installation, setup, and configuration process is too onerous. When it comes to visibility, traditional siloed tools provide only a partial picture that stop at the transport layer (L4). This inadequacy results in infrastructure-centric metrics that fail to deliver application-level insights.The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is a completely passive network device that hangs off a SPAN or network TAP. It passively auto-discovers all servers and devices connected to the network without any configuration. With a deep understanding of major networking protocols and close examination of all network traffic, the ExtraHop solution reconstructs the full picture of applications as they traverse the network. This information is surfaced up to the users via a rich web-based user interface that enables easy navigation and rapid drilldowns to any application, device, protocol, and even specific errors or database stored procedures.
Solving Real-World Problems
The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance System aids IT organizations with some of their toughest problems, including:- Troubleshooting intermittent problems – The ExtraHop solution delivers a full set of statistical data that includes both trends and outliers, portraying a realistic picture of application performance that highlights intermittent problems.
- Isolating slow stored procedures – With deep understanding of common database protocols, the ExtraHop solution captures and displays the most problematic stored procedures as well as error details.
- Predicting network congestion – An intelligent baselining feature learns over time, based on specific network patterns to gauge negative trends as compared to the standard performance levels based on time of the day and day of the week.
- Tuning load balancers and TCP stacks – ExtraHop turns everyone into a TCP-tuning expert by shining a spotlight on the most critical tuning parameters and delivering tuning guidelines through online Help.
- Benchmarking before and after – To help IT organizations benchmark and measure the true returns on any application or infrastructure project, ExtraHop delivers detailed baselines and reports with advanced visual analytics.
"The ability to move beyond the status quo and into solving profound problems that unlock valuable information to the entire IT organization is where future solutions are moving," said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm voke, inc. "Extracting the wealth of data that flows through the network on a daily basis is crucial. Performance metrics are one of the key pieces of information that every IT organization will need to manage mission critical platforms. ExtraHop breaks the barriers between application and network management to tap into the wealth of data that flows through the network, day in and day out."