IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview with Sai Sundhar Padmanabhan, ManageEngine

Handling High Flows in Network Traffic

Below, Sai Sundhar Padmanabhan, marketing analyst at ManageEngine, discusses the state of network traffic flows, why the ability to monitor high flow rates is critical to IT and business, and how to make sure you can handle high flows.

• Q: What’s driving the need to process high flow rates of network traffic?

A: IT network traffic volumes are surging due to bandwidth-hungry network applications and increasing numbers of users depending on the network for their everyday activities. The typical IT network runs several applications that are critical to the business and are accessed by the organization’s users. And as the business grows, more business-critical applications are deployed, and more people are added to the user base. This leads to the need for a monitoring solution that can scale up to handle high traffic flow volumes, as far as corporate core networks are concerned.

In the case of the data center, the search for scalable monitoring tools is almost an eternal process because the needs of that market are ever-growing. As a data center adds more companies and more end users demanding more services, the data center itself must match the service levels at that scale. And that means a scalable monitoring solution has to be in place.

• Q: What challenges do IT admins face when their tools can’t handle high flow rates?

A: IT teams need to constantly monitor their networks because the network is the backbone of the organization. Any sluggishness in the network needs to be addressed immediately. To identify the root cause of the problem, though, IT teams need a tool to pinpoint the spikes in the network. But the monitoring solutions have their own limitations in terms of their ability to handle high flow rates and store raw data to generate reports.

The scenario gets worse when an existing monitoring solution stops working in the middle of a troubleshooting operation. In such cases, IT teams can get themselves in very difficult situations. They neither manage to identify what caused the problem in the network nor have a clue as to how their monitoring solution stopped working. There are solutions for monitoring large data center networks that handle very high flow rates, but the heavy budgetary constraints these solutions impose makes it extremely difficult to get them approved. The complexity of installing these solutions into the IT network framework is another challenge.

To sum up, the different challenges faced by the IT teams are:

– High cost of scalable monitoring solutions

– Existing monitoring solution can’t scale up to meet the organization’s growing needs

– Technical complexity of implementing monitoring solutions and the additional costs of hiring consultants to assist with the implementation

• Q: How do these problems impact the end user?

A: When a scalable monitoring solution is not in place, the network can undergo a sudden slowdown, and the IT team has no way to troubleshoot it. With every sphere of the organization dependent on the network — from logistics to marketing to customer support — users at every level would be impacted by the slowdown. In turn, the slowdown could lead to a few minutes or a few hours of downtime, which is the worst nightmare for the organization. Slowdowns specifically impact the IT teams who are responsible for ensuring the network is constantly up and running. So, really, everybody from the end user to the top management is impacted.

• Q: What are the requirements of a monitoring solution for networks with high traffic flow rates?

A: It’s very important for organizations to consider long-term factors such as how they are expecting to grow and how, proportionately, they would need to increase their IT infrastructure — specifically, network resources. Data centers typically need to be prepared to operate seamlessly, even in dense flow-rate environments, which are inevitable today.

A truly scalable monitoring solution can give accurate insight into network traffic and help IT teams get to the root of the issues that arise in the shortest time, no matter how dense the flow rate. The solution shouldn’t affect the accuracy of reporting network traffic, the speed at which these reports are generated or the speed of the related troubleshooting. Using a monitoring solution is inevitable in today’s age of high-speed networks.

• Q: What are the advantages of a high flow monitoring solution?

A: The benefits of a monitoring solution that can handle high flow rates are:

– Real-time insight into network traffic even when traffic volumes are surging

– Accurate network traffic statistics despite extremely high flow rates

– Reports that improve the troubleshooting speed of IT teams

– Improved manageability of high-speed and high-flow rate networks

– Assured delivery of network applications without delays

– Superior end-user experience

Sai Sundhar Padmanabhan is the marketing analyst for NetFlow Analyzer at ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company. For more information on ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corp., please visit www.manageengine.com; follow the company blog at http://blogs.manageengine.com; on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ManageEngine and on Twitter at @ManageEngine.