Observer from Viavi

Observer and Apex from Viavi Solutions are network monitoring and packet capture solutions designed to tell you how well the applications are being delivered across your network. The main complaint from users is that “things are running slow” which means you need to measure response times to understand this, including going back in time to see what happened.

There is a wealth of information in packet captures but its not always easy to find the bit you are looking for or sort through the millions and millions of packets that can pass through key links in a few minutes. So the Observer range has been designed to offer tools that can see and simplify what’s going on with the data moving across your network.

Observer Analyzer laptop software

This is designed to allow your laptop to see more than just the packets, but get response time information and analyze the TCP and UDP layers as well. These are displayed by conversation so you can pick out the device you are interested in and see how its passing information and begin your analysis quickly.

Observer Portable range

These are high performance portable devices with full length bus architecture so the built in capture cards can perform at line rate speeds. A standard laptop will usually have a 1Gig card but will struggle to capture the bursts of information that a busy network will create. The Portables are designed to be put into the core of your network (1, 10 and 40Gig versions) and still get accurate information on every packet that’s passing. The portables allow you to cover number of locations with a high speed accurate device to be deployed when needed.

Observer Gigastor range

Observer Gigastors are designed to accurately store and index millions of packets so you can keep an complete record of what's been happening on your network. This allows you to go back and investigate issues that have already happened and see what the root causes were. Typically people deploy their laptops after the problem has occurred and hope for it to re-occur to get something meaningful, but this can waste days of time just waiting and then if your monitoring device can’t cope with the bursts of frames at this point you have useless or misleading information.

The Gigastor starts with Virtual options which are licensed by the amount of data they can store (not the speed of interface) so you can decide how big a window in time you want to store the data for. The virtual technology also means these can be remote deployed, cloud based or moved around as your situation demands. The Hardware Gigastors offer 100% line rate performance for accuracy and also enable a number of monitoring and security features to check your packets as they are stored rather than waiting for post analysis.

Observer Apex

This is the Application Performance Monitoring engine that takes the data from the Gigastors and displays the response time information for your key applications, servers and networks in a dashboard. Most user complaints are about time, its to slow, not responding etc so Apex takes the network data and turns it into information about how your systems deliver the data to the users and not just how busy they are.

• Look at networks by slowest and the busiest
• See which servers are the slowest to respond and gather the metrics as to why
• List applications that cause users to wait for replies the longest and start your investigation here
• Monitor and alarm when key business applications start to slow down
• Don’t wait until an application stops responding before acting
• 3 step workflows for investigating issues
• Zoom into the packets for deep analysis
• Monitor local and hosted apps with a combination of physical and virtual monitoring points

All the above can be organized into a series of custom dashboards, so each team can see the stats most relevant to them.

For a webex demonstration or meeting contact us now on 01677 428700 or email info@fullcontrolnetworks.co.uk, alternatively you can see it on Viavi's website.