OPNET: Application and Network Performance Suite

“Find the root cause of latency for your critical applications”

AppResponse Xpert Apppliance

OPNET's AppResponse Xpert is an appliance that can monitor any application which communicates over the Network. OPNET does this by passively monitoring all the IP conversations: Client to server and server to server. From this, we can generate over 80 metrics related to Network and End-User Application performance. This includes things such as Top Talkers, Bandwidth Hogs, etc. From high level SLA Dashboards to detailed breakdowns of the causes of delays (Network vs. Server), OPNET provides the breadth and depth needed to monitor and troubleshoot application problems.

For any of your Web Based applications (HTTP/HTTPs), we can provide detailed Web Transaction Analysis (WTA) to show which pages are accessed the most, what the response time is for each web page, if there are any HTTP 400 errors etc. For all applications (web or otherwise), OPNET’s appliance can pro-actively capture full packets related to "problems". The appliance(s) utilize the concept of a Rolling Buffer and Problem Buffer. The biggest  appliance even has a rolling buffer that will always retain the last 6TB of full packet data. Depending on the throughput in your environment, this means you can retain data for days, weeks, or even months. When AppResponse Xpert see's a problem with any application, it can pull packets from the Rolling Buffer and place them into a 600GB “Problem Buffer”. This is a dedicated repository of nothing but packets related to problems. This leads to pro-active troubleshooting vs. the reactive approach of getting users to replicate the issue and capture packets after the problem is reported

Two other capabilities of the OPNET Appliance is NetFlow, VOIP Analysis. The VoIP Analysis module can provide 50 additional metrics on VoIP performance including MOS, R-Factor, Jitter, Delay, etc. MWV uses SIP and H.323, both of which are fully supported by OPNET. OPNET can show the complete call setup, signaling and keep per-call level records allowing for call specific details and troubleshooting.

Software version of Appliance:  AppResponse Xpert Appliance on RSP: utilizes the Riverbed Services Platform which allows us to run a software version of our appliance on the Riverbed Steelhead devices. By doing this, we can provide real-tme visibility into both WAN and LAN side performance including what data is being requested on the LAN and how much of that data is actually being accelerated across the WAN.
Software that integrates with Appliance:

AppTransaction Xpert

OPNET's AppTransaction Xpert is a software based solution for rapid packet analysis. It allows us to leverage packet captures for detailed Network and Protocol Analysis. The packets used by AppTransaction Xpert can come directly from the appliance (AppResponse Xpert), your existing Wireshark/Sniffer/etc. packet captures, or from the FREE and unlicensed capture agents that come with AppTransaction Xpert. These lightweight agents are used by some of our mature customers as part their standard server/desktop images.
.n addition to supporting over 700 application protocol and decodes, we support the Riverbed WAN Acceleration protocol. While the OPNET appliance on RSP allows us to see real-time performance metrics in a Riverbed environment, our decode support in AppTransaction Xpert allows us to capture packets related to specific transactions and show you how much of the application traffic is being accelerated. This provides unparalleled insight into Riverbed which is typically a problem for other vendors. Additionally, AppTransaction Xpert can take packet captures and do predictive modeling. Things such as Bandwidth, Latency, TCP Window Size, etc. can be changed to understand whether the application can benefit from these type of Network changes.

AppTelemetry Xpert

OPNET's AppTelemetry Xpert solution provides agent-less monitoring of any SNMP enabled device (including those with custom MIBs). This includes devices such as servers, routers, switches, firewalls, etc. Our AppPath Analysis feature allows us to isolate performance problems between IP addresses down to the specific network device. By integrating with the OPNET appliance. Thus you can identify a network delay between two IP addresses and correlate that back to the path the IP conversation took on your network with SNMP metrics. Rather than just saying the network was slow between point A and B, we can show that Router X between points A and B was dropping packets. In addition, we can use SNMP to pull metrics from servers such as CPU, Memory, top processes, etc.

AppInternals Xpert

OPNET's AppInternals Xpert solution provides detailed performance metrics at the application level (Web Server, App Server, Database, Operating System, etc.). For any MWV application that utilizes Java or .NET, OPNET can provide code level details around the performance of the various classes, methods, SQL calls, and give you over 2,000+ metrics .