Next generation of Observer platform offering expanded RNA features 26 October, 2008 By Chris Talbot

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Observer 13, which has been in development for the last 1.5 years, was designed to meet certain goals, most of which were brought about because of customer needs and demands. Network Instruments' goal was to provide a better depiction of application performance, offer expanded retrospective network analysis (RNA) features, provide more functionality tailored to the financial sector and provide more general visibility into the network and applications, said Charles Thompson, manager of systems engineering at Network Instruments.

Within the network monitoring space, RNA has become a critical element. All types of companies are asking for it, so Network Instruments expanded the RNA features in Observer in this latest release.

"It's really become the driving force of the network monitoring and management space," Thompson said.

With Network Instruments' GigaStor product as its RNA base, Thompson said the vendor set out to offer macro and micro timeline views to increase an IT administrator's ability to pinpoint problems on the network and within applications. With more active reporting and new data stream reconstruction technology, Observer 13 provides IT administrators with the ability to identify problems more easily and reduce the time to resolution, he said.

"You've got the ability to drill down to a specifid user and find out exactly what they did in whatever timeframe you want," Thompson said.

For application performance, Network Instruments has added application-level reporting features that enable administrators to drill down into applications, starting from a high-level view and diving deeper to get more granular reporting as they want it, he explained.

"You've got that ability to go from a high-level conceptual view of an application down to the individual packets that are being transferred between a specific user and a specific server to see what's going on," he said.

For monitoring the performance of the network and applications, Observer 13 has new auto-baselining capabilities that learn what's normal for the network and applications. It sets baseline parameters, and when the network or applications begin to go outside of those parameters, it triggers notifications so the problem can be dealt with.

Specific to the financial sector is in-depth support and analysis of the FIX financial protocol, Thompson said. Observer 13 has several other features designed for the financial sector, including the ability to track all transactions each user makes and microburst analysis support to track changes right down to the nanosecond.

With more mobility in the workforce, Observer 13 also supports the 802.11n wireless standard. It also supports up to 512 Network Instruments NetFlow devices on a single Observer 13 piece of hardware, which is a significant increase from the previous support for up to a dozen NetFlow devices.

"Really expanding the scalability of this offering is something we really feel is rqeuired by the industry and something we were really excited about being able to do," Thompson said.

Network Instruments does 80 per cent of its business in North American through the channel, and Observer 13 will give those partners the ability to return to existing customers with the enhanced and new functions in the product, he said.

"The obvious opportunity is as we continue to improve our product set, they have a better product to sell," he said.