Network Management just moved up another rung on the strategic IT priorities ladder with the
announcement from CA that it’s acquiring NetQoS. The biggest message: It’s becoming increasingly clear that getting network management right is critical to building, operating and optimizing next generation IT infrastructures. NetQoS’ deep network and application performance management capabilities coupled with CA’s core application, network and data center management solutions goes a long way towards the goal of delivering end-to-end management capabilities for IT infrastructure. Ray Le Maistre of LightReading does a great job of
summarizing the joint value points across CA’s portfolio.
Netcordia shares a number of
customers with both CA and NetQoS and two of the more often repeated messages these and other customers hammer us with is that:
1) They want to get ahead of problems by “cleaning up” their networks by standardizing and fine tuning the network, devices and configurations
2) They need to be able to “close the loop” when managing quality—tie performance (app/system/network) and fault/event views with network config and change management (NCCM) through automation
While it seems a million things can cause poor network performance, fundamentally there are two main culprits—congestion/contention/usage and network change/configurations errors. NCCM is a fundamental process to reducing the impact on both by building a more consistent network and isolating the hard to find causes if there is a problem. We look forward to seeing and participating in this evolution in next generation network management.
Dave Barry