Alluvio NetIM

Infrastructure management, monitoring and troubleshooting. These are some of Alluvio NetIM features we discuss in this article.

The Business Challenge

Maintaining a high-performing and secure network across today’s complex hybrid infrastructure requires holistic visibility. Over 58% of enterprises report blind spots in their digital delivery chain, which is a significant challenge1 . Infrastructure teams often have difficulty managing proactively while performance blind spots make troubleshooting difficult and time consuming across their multi-cloud hybrid infrastructure.

Unfortunately, disruptive technology is only increasing this pressure. DevOps causes servers to be quickly added and retired, cloud adoption causes new network challenges, and IoT places increased burden on network bandwidth and performance. Without a new, holistic approach to ITIM, companies will fall behind, failing to deliver the initiatives and services that drive the business.

The Riverbed Solution

Alluvio™ NetIM is a holistic solution for discovering, mapping, monitoring and troubleshooting your infrastructure. It enables companies to capture infrastructure topology, detect performance and configuration issues, map application network paths, diagram your network and troubleshoot infrastructure problems. NetIM is built on a modern, containerized architecture to provide expansive horizontal scalability, ultra-high performance and cloud deployment for operational agility. As an integrated component of the Alluvio NPM platform, customers can manage infrastructure issues in the context of overall, blended performance management.

Comprehensive Visibility

As a part of the Alluvio Unified NPM, NetIM adds critical infrastructure data and analysis. This complements other performance domains (application performance, network performance, UC, and end-user experience management), and provides context to infrastructure management. It enables companies to holistically manage performance and rapidly troubleshoot problems.

Real-Time Monitoring

Alluvio NetIM leverages multiple approaches (e.g., synthetic testing, SNMP, CLI, IP SLA metrics, syslog, and traps) to continually discover and identify new and changed infrastructure components.

Automated Analytics

Powerful analysis enables users to establish performance baselines, measure current performance, and identify anomalies and violations. Configuration information is also captured, and similar analytics are applied to detect and identify configuration changes, which may impact the infrastructure.

Rich Visualization

Alluvio NetIM provides a rich set of tailored information from real-time topology with information overlays and dashboards for level 1 operations, to advanced reporting for heads of IT operations.

Troubleshoot Performance

Search-based workflows, event management, and on-demand network paths enable companies to quickly identify and troubleshoot infrastructure performance issues. In addition, Portalbased blended views enable organizations to analyze infrastructure issues in the context of applications, network, and end-user performance.

Capacity Planning

Right-size IT infrastructure capacity to support growing traffic needs. Analyze network usage to identify trends, threshold violations, inefficiencies, and other atypical behavior. NetIM provides evidence of when you’ll need to upgrade devices, interfaces, and tunnels to meet service level objectives.

Modern Application Architecture

Alluvio NetIM is designed to meet the scale and performance demands of the largest of the large enterprises. Designed from ground up with webscale technologies such as containerized micro services, Kafka messaging framework, Cassandra big-data database and multi-tenancy, IT teams can expect:

• High degree of horizontal scale
• Microservices for superior fault tolerance
• Ultimate operational agility with cloud deployment
• Highest data security with multi-tenancy

For more Riverbed Products, Riverbed License

Key Benefits of Alluvio NetIM

Alluvio NetIM dramatically reduces the workload associated with managing and monitoring your infrastructure. It maximizes network availability by reducing performance blind spots, empowering proactive infrastructure management, and improving troubleshooting.

Increasing IT infrastructure visibility and understanding

• Discover and map infrastructure devices
• Identify changed devices
• Leverage real time network topology views to monitor infrastructure performance

Alerting and anomaly detection

• Alert filtering and site suppression
• Automatically set performance baselines
• Identify performance deviations
• Streamline hand-off between infrastructure and network teams

Troubleshoot infrastructure issues with actionable intelligence

• Drill-down from high-level blended performance views to application specific topology maps
• Quickly identify infrastructure elements that are underperforming or
• misconfigured
• Understand application path as it travels throughout the network

Key Features In Depth

Real-time Network Topology

• Alluvio NetIM leverages multiple approaches (e.g., synthetic testing, SNMP, IP SLA metrics) to identify new and changed components within the infrastructure topology
• Topology views that are updated in real-time providing instant insight into the health and performance of the managed infrastructure
• Alluvio NetIM now supports Streaming Telemetry which is a real time, push based mechanism that removes the inefficiencies of polling

Reporting

• Reports including performance, inventory, availability, capacity planning, and more
• Interface group tagging enables you to creates custom attributes and assign attribute values

Proactive performance management

• Curated views provide drilldown details into site, group, device, interface and IP SLA metrics
• Out-of-the-box reports provide insight into your managed infrastructure and operational issues
• Automated health index scores help identify poor performers
• Synthetic testing allows you to proactively monitor application availability and performance remotely from various locations in your network

Efficient troubleshooting

• Troubleshooting Toolbox empowers IT operations managers with the ability to triage and troubleshoot issues that relate to network availability, performance and configuration information
• Metrics navigator provides in-depth visibility and troubleshooting into the performance issues by letting users mix and match multiple metrics from different devices in a single view and compare them
• AppNetwork Path shows how application data transverses the network making performance troubleshooting easier
• One-click drill down between Alluvio NetProfiler and Alluvio NetIM combines network traffic information with infrastructure (availability, performance and configuration)
• Alluvio NetIM now includes NetAuditor’s powerful rules engine. This allows users to create a “golden configuration template” and check a running network config against it, helping ensure best practices are being followed.

For more information, Alluvio Unified Observability

Wireless LAN Monitoring

• Provides visibility into which controllers are being accessed, and which clients are connected to which access points
• WLAN Monitoring delivers the following performance data:

1. Access Point status and statistics (e.g. quantity by model, OS version, type)
2. WLAN Controller statistics (e.g. aggregated WAP health, total active client count, AP status percentage)