Prepared to be proactive.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)

Users find new performance management tools help them anticipate end-user complaints and nip net problems in the bud.

Ron 'Meara wants to put the network management team at NationsBank out of business. And NationsBank hopes he succeeds.

'Meara, manager of the Performance Engineering Department at NationsBank, now part of Bank of America, leads an eight-person unit in Richmond, Va., dedicated solely to performance management - the art of avoiding network problems before they occur. The key to this art, he says, is using tools that measure application performance from an end-user perspective.

The way 'Meara describes it, network management is fundamentally reactive: "Somebody has to sit there and watch the icons turn red and blue and do something about it when they do." Performance management, on the other hand, is proactive. "You collect data about your network so you can predict what it's going to look like tomorrow. Then you can engineer away a lot of situations that make those icons turn red or blue," he says.

'Meara uses a product called Pegasus from Ganymede Software to set threshold-based traps on key parts of NationsBank's 22-state network. Lightweight agents on desktops, servers and other network devices enable Pegasus to determine baseline performance. For example, Pegasus may find that, on average, response time is three seconds when a user in a bank branch is accessing a remote Lotus Notes server. In that case, 'Meara might guarantee the branch that response time will be no worse than five seconds. He will then set the trap at four seconds, so if response time begins to slip, he will be notified and will hopefully be able to address the problem before end users even notice.

That's the goal, but analysts say performance management tools still have a way to go before they deliver on their promises. For one thing, the tools may tell you that Lotus Notes' response time is heading south, but they won't likely tell you why. The best you'll probably get is an indication of whether the problem is with the client, the server or the network.

When 'Meara receives an alert from a trap, he turns to a separate set of diagnostic tools to pinpoint exactly where the problem lies. He then turns that information over to the network engineering department, which actually figures out how to fix the problem.

While there are shortcomings, these performance management tools nonetheless provide a level of information that users have been searching for, says Susan Aldrich, an analyst at Patricia Seybold Group in Boston. Up to now, users haven't been able to get a good read on average user-response times and therefore can't be certain when the times get better or worse.

"It's a big step forward to say, 'Yeah, there is a problem and this is how bad the problem is, response time has deteriorated from one second to 2.5 seconds over the past month," Aldrich says. "Although at this stage, you've still got a lot of investigating to do to figure out what you could do to improve the situation."

But users swear by these new performance management tools. Traditional network management tools do a good job of pinpointing when a particular circuit is going from 40% to 60% utilization, but they don't indicate what impact, if any, the increase has on end users.

"My problem was that I would get a user calling in the morning saying, 'My response time is poor,' " says Tony Fortwengler, director of technical services at Southwest Gas Corp. in Las Vegas.

Fortwengler says he was frustrated because he had no way of measuring end-user response time for the client/server-based inventory and work-order system, and no way of anticipating what kinds of problems were lurking just over the horizon. "It was always an after-the-fact thing."

Fortwengler went searching on the Internet and found a product called FirstSense from FirstSense Software. He installed FirstSense agents on one workstation at each of 50 branch offices in the Southwest where the natural gas company's 500 trucks receive their work orders. The FirstSense tool not only alerted Fortwengler to a slowdown in application performance, it also narrowed the problem down to the WAN. "It was real good data that we couldn't get previously," he says.

Fortwengler replaced the 56K bit/sec private lines that ran between each site and the main office in Las Vegas with T-1 frame relay links and saw average response times drop from 30 seconds to three seconds. Skeptics could argue that adding bandwidth was the obvious solution all along, but FirstSense gave him the ammunition he needed to prove that the problem existed. Likewise, after he upgraded the network he had solid numbers, which he presented to users and upper management to prove the upgrade worked.

Performance management tools can raise some implementation and privacy issues. Kevin Kelly, manager of network management for administrative information systems at the University of Illinois' Champagne-Urbana campus, says some end users on campus object to having tools on their desktops that monitor their activities.

As a result, Kelly is moving slowly in his rollout of the VitalSigns performance monitoring tool from INSoft. Since July, he has installed the VitalSigns agent on only 125 of more than 4,000 desktop machines scattered across campus.

And in many cases he's installing VitalSigns only after someone complains about poor performance, which he acknowledges defeats the software's proactive capabilities, in a sense.

Still, Kelly is bullish about the product. End users simply go to a Web site and download a 1M-byte file that loads in about a minute, he says. The software agents report back to a central database on everything from whether a connection attempt has failed to how long it takes to make a connection to the actual throughput.

NationsBank's 'Meara makes this bold prediction: "As this technology evolves, I see 50% of network problems engineered out of existence before the user even rides the wires. I firmly believe that."

Even the skeptical Aldrich sees network managers turning to performance management tools. While the tools aren't perfect, she says managers "can't stand knowing nothing."