AppCritical Overview
IP networks have become one of the most critical parts of the infrastructure organisations rely on to run their day-to-day business operations.
Unfortunately, most networks suffer from a range of dysfunctions that impair performance - technically simple problems that can almost entirely go unnoticed and undiagnosed due to lack of visibility in the network behaviour. Gartner supports this opinion with its announcement a few years ago that only 15% of networks could support VoIP, in their current condition.
For applications that are network-dependent, like VoIP, their performance is tightly correlated to the underlying network performance. But VoIP is not an exception - worldwide trends such as collaboration, explosion in storage requirements and convergence all place extreme demands on the network. As a result, the network's inability to perform at an acceptable level of quality is felt throughout the organisation. This trauma underscores the importance of managing networks in terms of application performance.
And to do so, requires not only a new way of thinking, but a new way of doing.
Introducing: AppCritical
AppCritical is a network performance system that is actively aware of the network path quality required by today's business applications. Unlike traditional network management tools, AppCritical reduces network complexity by virtualising the network and providing awareness of the most critical network characteristics needed by the application. Without using agents or invasively taxing the network, AppCritical provides the complete picture of the network. It records all the important measurements and using automated diagnostics [or autognostics], it identifies and isolates the faults. Once the network is optimised and validated, AppCritical's RPM [or Real-Time Performance Monitoring] System takes over, assuring performance continues to meet user-specified Service Quality Definitions [SQD]. If any of the measured characteristics such as bandwidth, loss, jitter, and even QoS parameters or routes are outside the thresholds, then AppCritical automatically escalates testing. Once the degradation is confirmed, AppCritical initiates a full scale test and sends notification to a designated user if the threshold violation is validated. Not simply notice that an event occurred, but results of the comprehensive test, including complete performance measurements, nature of any detected faults and where these faults are located so that corrective action can be taken immediately - before end users are impacted. Considering the historical approaches, AppCritical makes troubleshooting networks very easy, very quick and very cost-effective. It quickly figures out what the problem is, where the problem is and what can be done to fix it.Redefining network management, AppCritical:
- Does not require client-side agents - you can monitor anything you can ping;
- Continuously evaluates the entire network path in real-time between two points rather than just individual network devices located on the path;
- Detects and diagnoses network faults rather than just reports stats and up/down notifications;
- Measures actual end-to-end network performance characteristics (like bandwidth, loss, jitter, etc.) rather than auditing info (like traffic or CPU usage of a single device);
- Provides visibility into your service provider networks; don't need a password for their devices (which you would never get);
- Links network performance to the quality of the user experience;
- Assures the network is providing the service quality the application requires to meet end-user expectation;
- Delivers notifications and reports that include complete performance measurements, nature of any detected faults and where these faults are located so that corrective action can be taken immediately - before end users are impacted.
- Fixing a network performance problem before it impacts users means less employee downtime and no wasted human resources;
- The agent-less deployment decreases management costs;
- With a solution that identifies the cause and location of a problem, the network engineer's valuable time is better spent fixing the problem not playing detective;
- This precise intelligent analysis also assures time is spent in the right area. Often the network is blamed for a problem that exists elsewhere;
- Remote access capability means you don't have the added expense of rolling a truck to support a customer.
Versions
There are five editions of AppCritical to satisfy your varying needs:- AppCritical Professional Edition
- AppCritical SME Edition
- AppCritical Enterprise Edition
- AppCritical MSP Edition
- AppCritical Technical Support Edition
...Flash Overview (opens in new window) 
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