The First and Only IP Network Assurance Mashup
Like a GoogleMaps™ service for your network
NetSocket likens its approach to real-time IP service assurance, based on its revolutionary Session2Topology™ correlation engine, to an information mashup much like the Google Maps™ mapping service.
Why a mashup?
Mashups take vastly disparate data sets and correlate them, automatically and instantly, to create a novel view that exceeds a mere assembly of uncorrelated parts.
The Google Maps service takes information about essentially unrelated things – traffic conditions, current weather, phone book information, real estate prices – and puts them all together onto a single map. The result is an entirely new, uniquely valuable entity.
Instead of looking at a map and simply seeing lines on a page, you can see – in one place, simultaneously – the best route at this particular moment to drive from where you are to where you want to go, avoiding current traffic jams, as well as weather conditions and restaurants located en route.
The brilliance of the Google Maps service is not that it provides information that was unavailable before, but how it correlates it: creating an information mashup that lets you find critical answers, quickly and easily.
The need for information mashups in IP service assurance
NetSocket applies an analogous information mashup approach to assuring real-time IP services. Here’s why this approach is needed. IP networks were designed to move large volumes of data (packets) from point A to point B. IP networks work extremely well for things such as web traffic, file transfers, and e-mail.
To cut costs and increase network efficiency, organizations started running telephone calls and video communications over IP networks, as VoIP, videoconferencing, telepresence, unified communications, and other real-time services. Increasingly, business– and mission-critical communications services are migrating to IP networks.
The problem is that IP networks weren’t designed to handle real-time, live, or interactive services with the high availability and performance of their legacy, single-use, circuit-based networks. Real-time services are very sensitive to latency and packet drop, and IP networks are far from deterministic.
The fundamental IP network architecture has an “awareness” gap between the session layer (the layer that sets up services such as VoIP, telepresence, etc.) and the network layer (the layer that handles underlying transport of the sessions).
What’s worse, different aspects of IP networks are managed by different, separate experts. If end users complain about poor VoIP conversation quality, or glitches in a videoconference, the network and services experts have to assemble, share their uncorrelated performance information, and manually attempt to isolate the root cause of the complaint – a process that takes hours to days to weeks.
In the meantime, important communications aren’t getting through and operational costs soar, as the best and brightest are spending their time attempting to isolate service quality issues. Lost, disrupted, or less-than-perfect communications means lost money for enterprises, and perhaps even worse for mission-critical military communications.
Organizations need their experts to be able to see the link between the services or applications and the underlying network – automatically and proactively. If there’s a problem, they need to pinpoint its source within seconds – not in the hours, days, or weeks it might take today.
Enter NetSocket's multi-network-layer information mashup approach.
NetSocket mashes the network information – network topology (path), traffic congestion, and failure events, even transient ones – with information about the services, such as:
- media information (including packet loss, delays, etc.)
- session information (such as type of session, bandwidth required, codec used).
These previously separate streams of valuable information are correlated and presented in a single, useful platform. Network managers can find critical answers to issues in the network and relate it to individual end–user experience, quickly and easily.
This enhanced session visibility into the past and present performance of real-time services means that problems are identified and fixed fast, often with a couple of mouse clicks and before end users even notice there’s a problem.
With NetSocket’s information mashup approach, delivered through its patented Session2Topology correlation engine, real-time services perform better and more reliably. End users can be more productive, and the organizations that depend on these services can become more competitive and profitable.
In the end, NetSocket’s multi-layer information mashups delivers an innovative, powerful way to gain the most business value from IP networks.