What are the evolving criteria for network management?
Noel: Three or four years ago, I needed a tool to tell me if a router is crossing a certain threshold and deliver that information to a console, where I can grab all that data and know what router is having trouble. That is nice, but it doesn’t give you a sense of how things work together to deliver the service. When an application is slow, how do you fix it when it depends on five servers and two subnets? There is a lot of finger-pointing going on. The question is, ‘How do we make that finger-pointing disappear?’ How can we make service level management feasible? We have tons of data but don’t really have anything that does analysis, or that relates between these things from a business service perspective. You have pointed to protocol analysis tools as one approach that may be able to provide an answer. What are protocol analysis tools? Noel: Basically, they are sniffers on steroids. They go out there and try to understand how traffic flows across the network and then pull that inform
