NetScout Systems and Mercury Interactive on May 10 will team up to combine NetScouts deep-dive network monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting with Mercurys application management.
Mercury, at its Mercury World Australia users conference in Melbourne will demonstrate the results of its integration partnership with NetScout—an adapter that allows performance data gathered by NetScout probes and nGenius Performance Manager to be integrated with Mercury server and application performance data in its Business Availability Center.
“They have had one of the best solutions for looking at applications from a business service management point of view. We can provide the domain expertise in looking application performance from the network side,” said Bruce Sweet, vice president of business development at NetScout in Westford, Mass.
“The nGenius Performance Manager gets the information from our probes and flow collectors. All events we generate are propagated through nGenius into BAC,” he said.
“Theres real value in having the combination of Mercurys depth for diagnostics on an application level and NetScouts application flow over the infrastructure,” said industry analyst Dennis Drogseth of Enterprise Management Associates in Portsmouth, N.H.
“We think its an important step for Mercury, and it shows NetScout has relevance for the application performance management space. The application flow over the network perspective is no longer a minor consideration,” he added.
The joint development effort allows network and performance event data from NetScout products to be sent to Mercurys SiteScope, which allows context-sensitive drill-down into the events.
SiteScope parses that information and sends it to the Business Availability Center Dashboard. The dashboard adds a new network dimension to the views it provides into performance.
That dimension adds to the Dashboards basic network status such details as bandwidth utilization by application, top talkers, NetFlow statistics, network errors and VOIP (voice over IP) data.
“Mercurys products are finely detailed in application and server diagnostics. We provide complementary detail from a network perspective,” said Sweet.
The two companies believe that their integration work will help customers bridge the gap between different management silos to reduce mean time to repair.
“Its an age-old problem. When an application [appears to be] running slowly, is it a server or a network component? The technologies both companies bring to bear we believe will be able to significantly speed up that triage,” said Sweet.
Although no money has changed hands between the two companies, and they will continue to market their respective products separately, Sweet still believes that both companies “have skin in the game,” he said.
“Trying to get companies to do engineering work is a tough task. The fact that Mercury developed the EMS adapter for our data speaks volumes to where this could go in the future,” he added.
The adapter is included in the most recent release of Mercurys SiteScope version 8.12. NetScout has incorporated its changes into its latest versions of its network probes and nGenius Performance Manager.
As part of its joint development alliance, which NetScout believes has the potential to lead to greater collaboration, NetScout joined the Mercury Alliance Program as a Premier member.
