Load Balancer Featured Article

WildPackets Talks Application Performance Management, WatchPoint 2.0 Release with TMCnet

By Carrie Schmelkin, TMCnet Web Editor

For over 20 years, WildPackets (News - Alert) has been in the business of making the process of packet analysis a whole lot snazzier.

“The key identifier is our speed to resolution, our ability to take packet information – which isn’t very interesting – and to look at and pull out anomalies and visualizations,” Joe Habib, director of global sales for WildPackets, told TMCnet at Interop (News - Alert) 2011 in New York City last week.

WildPackets is a provider of network, application performance, and protocol analysis, VoIP monitoring, and troubleshooting solutions. From network performance management to VoIP analysis products to application solutions, WildPackets delivers a range of solutions designed to help all the different industries. WildPackets solutions are fully extensible and include training, professional service, custom engineering, and support offerings, according to company officials.

Over the past two decades, WildPackets has found a home in a variety of industries – from the school that wants to give students network access but wants to closely monitor whether the students are using the network safely to the bank that needs a solution that addresses application performance management.

Recently, WildPackets’ work in the security sector has surged, according to Habib.

“Security became bigger because people are realizing that attacks do happen and people want to go back in time to see what took place,” he said. 

But while at Interop, WildPackets had a more important news item it needed to shed some light on – the unveiling of WatchPoint 2.0, a solution that consolidates SNMP, flow-based and packet-based network monitoring and reporting into a single system. The solution satisfies management’s need for high-level reporting, while also meeting network engineers’ need to both analyze historical network data and perform real-time root cause network analysis, according to company officials.

While centralized network monitoring is widely accepted as a requirement for enterprises of all sizes, high-level network monitoring based on SNMP or NetFlow is typically insufficient for rapidly pinpointing and fixing the root cause of network bottlenecks. WatchPoint 2.0 speaks to this issue by providing a single system that compiles data from sources across the entire global network.

“The ultimate goal is to provide a single pane of glass into what is happening in the network,” Habib said. “There are many network sources that network engineers rely upon, and our goal was how do you normalize that data and give people the view in to the network. Because we are looking at the packets, we break everything down by segments. Being able to see multiple segments from a single view allows you to determine if there is an issue on a particular segment.”

According to Habib, anyone looking to gain further visibility into what their network is doing stands to benefit from WatchPoint 2.0.

“It’s hard to put a cost or an advantage to knowing what your network does but once something happens then people realize they needed to know,” he said. “It’s about freeing up your network staff to have them do what they were hired to do.”

“We are constantly trying to prove product performance, product usability and we listen to our customers,” Habib said of the new release. “They are who we go to for our product direction and what they would like to see in the product; we are a customer driven focused company.”

To learn more about WildPackets, check out the video interview that took place at ITEXPO West in Austin, Texas, last month between TMC’s (News - Alert) Editorial Director Erik Linask and Habib.

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