Hello my name is Rob Hock, Product Manager for NPM
here at Solarwinds. Today we want to review SolarWinds Deep Packet Inspection and analysis
and the Quality of Experience Dashboard. Introduced in SolarWinds Network
Performance Monitor 11.0,
the Quality of Experience Dashboard, or QoE, provides unique insight into
whether a performance problem is related to network,
or application performance. Let's take a look at the data presented in QoE,
and how we help you determine whether you have an application or network
issue.
Directly from the QoE dashboard, you are presented with a few key metrics.
Firstly, the Network Response Time, or TCP three-way Handshake,
and Application Response Time, or Time to First Byte.
These metrics are broken out by application, and provide an at-a-glance
ability to correlate and
identify the source of application issues. Additionally, QoE provides data on
overall transaction and data volume. Let's take a look at a concrete example.
By unselecting all applications except HTTP, it becomes apparent that the
network contributes for about half of the overall HTTP traffic response time
perceived by users,
except during this hour, when it actually contributed for almost all of it.
This example points to a network issue, which can be further analyzed by
navigating to the network management screens of NPM.
If the analysis of the charts points you to an application issue,
you also have the ability to drill down to the server where the application is
running.
From there you can look at the detailed information that the Server and Application
Monitor module provides.
Using this information, you can confirm the high response time of the server
and application itself. This will also be an indicator of the overall quality
of experience perceived by the users.
QoE Also contains handy resources to display response time metrics
in the context of threshold breaches. Dynamic thresholds can be set,
which allows for dynamic alerting conditions, and / or simple anomaly detection.
More on that later. You may also notice several resources dedicated to
application classification.
Out-of-the-box, the QoE dashboard is able to identify and classify
1,200 applications. We break down application categories by risk level
and classification. So how does QoE get this data?
By installing sensors on Windows-based systems, we are able to capture packet-
level data across your environment. Sensors come in two flavors:
the "Server" sensor that is installed on a server involved in a transaction,
for example, directly on your Exchange server, and also the "Network" sensor,
which is installed on a dedicated system attached to a tap or mirror port.
Both sensors may be deployed directly from the settings grid.
To access sensor settings, visit, "Settings",
"QoE Settings", then
"Manage Packet Analysis Sensors." To deploy a new sensor,
simply "Add Packet Analysis Sensor". In this case,
we'll deploy a new "Server" sensor.
Select the node to deploy to. Note the list is pre-filtered for Windows nodes
already managed by your SolarWinds installation. Assign and test credentials,
then deploy away.
Once Sensor deployment is complete, you will receive notice in the message bar,
and see the updated agent status in the management grid.
The final step is to tell the sensor which applications it should be looking
for.
By default, a sensor will filter for HTTP traffic.
Click the "pencil icon" to the right to add additional applications.
To perform bulk application assignments,
visit the "Manage QoE Applications" settings page. Here, you can select an
application,
change the application classifications,
and bulk assign the application to existing sensors.
To create your own custom HTTP application,
select "Create New HTTP Application" in the new application wizard.
After providing details on the classification of the app,
define the filter.
There are a variety of filter options available to fit your unique
requirements.
From there,
simply define where to detect the applications.
This concludes our
overview of the Quality of Experience feature in SolarWinds Network Performance
Monitor.
We hope you have found it informative, and that the QoE feature makes it easier for you to
troubleshoot performance issues.
For more information, or to download a trial of NPM,
please visit www.solarwinds.com.