Technology - Application Performance Monitoring

Distributed enterprises are spending more of their IT budgets just to keep business applications up and running. In parallel the proliferation harmful or non-essential apps — from banner ads to P2P applications — continues to escalate and consume bandwidth, so incremental network and bandwidth upgrades don’t always solve performance issues. To clearly see and control what applications are consuming your bandwidth, you need intelligent visibility across your extended network.

Blue Coat Application Performance Monitoring technologies are designed to help you discover, classify and prioritize applications, content and user access in real time, including business-critical content, malware and recreational traffic such as iTunes, YouTube and IM. With granular application visibility, you can:

• Auto-discover and classify 600+ applications including custom developed applications
• Shape and report bandwidth at the application level, according to business requirements
• Measure user response times and proactively set performance thresholds
• Monitor voice and video quality in real time
• Manage, meter or block recreational application traffic to reclaim network bandwidth
• Set and maintain service-level agreements for business critical applications

Discover, classify and prioritize applications, content and user access

Blue Coat provides detailed insight into all your applications by leveraging the most advanced Layer 7+ technologies. These technologies include features that help you identify and control even the most evasive applications, including those that port-hop. You can even sub-classify key enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle and Citrix to better focus on business processes.

With this detailed data, you can classify and prioritize traffic to ensure your critical applications are always available and delivered as expected. You can also monitor other factors that impact the user experience, such as network and server delays, so you can get your applications back up to speed quickly.

Blue Coat Application Performance Monitoring products include:

• Blue Coat PacketShaper helps IT identify all the applications on the network and monitor response times and utilization at the application level.
   
• Blue Coat IntelligenceCenter is central management software that collects, correlates and reports on PacketShaper performance data across multiple PacketShaper devices.
   
• Blue Coat PolicyCenter provides a centralized approach to policy configuration and makes it easier to manage application class trees, automate firmware and plug-in updates, and backup and monitor larger PacketShaper deployments.