Net Physics tells all
Network Physics NP-1000 monitors Internet traffic from server to end user
ONE OF THE GREAT challenges of running a Web site has been to learn enough about your Internet traffic to provide visitors to your site with the level of service they need. The reason, of course, is that it’s difficult to know what’s really happening on the Internet.
Now you can look into the Internet cloud in ways you never could before. Network Physics provides an appliance that allows IT managers to look inside the Internet and find out what is happening to their traffic. They can now monitor their server performance, keep tabs on service-level agreements, find out which networks are carrying their traffic, monitor end-user issues such as bottlenecks and response times, and even check the effectiveness of their load balancers, among other things.
To accomplish this, the Network Physics NP-1000 appliance provides a wealth of data about your network traffic, presenting it in a wide variety of tables, charts, and graphs. In terms of the information the appliance provides, it’s a home run. Unfortunately, hitting that information home run requires some work.
Most companies that would benefit from the NP-1000 face two significant impediments. The first is a significant learning curve to using the information this product provides. The second is that it’s scalable only to a point: It tops out at 400Mbps.
Because the NP-1000 needs real Internet traffic to produce useful results, we teamed with ISP Cox Communications in Fairfax County, Va., and placed the NP-1000 in the company’s network operations center. Given the NP-1000’s bandwidth limitations, we were only able to monitor a portion of the traffic at Cox, so the results presented an interesting sample but not a complete look at what was happening on the Cox network.
The NP-1000 consists of a pair of 1U appliances that connect into a backbone network: The SmartProbe samples the traffic, and the Coordinator handles the database storage and the reporting. These devices do not need to be physically located together as long as they can communicate over your network. Communication between the units and between your browser and the Coordinator are encrypted.
The NP-1000 setup process consists mainly of the basic step of setting IP addresses and then choosing an operational mode. You have two choices, depending on whether you want to use a span port to look at all traffic or whether you want all traffic to pass through the NP-1000. Because the traffic levels at Cox Communications exceeded the bandwidth of the NP-1000, we chose to use a span port. This meant we also had to tell the device which IP addresses were servers internal to the company, so that the appliance could identify inbound and outbound traffic.
Once installed, the NP-1000 starts watching the traffic and filling its database. You can access the data from anywhere on the Internet as long as you can reach the device with a secure browser connection.
The greatest problem with using the NP-1000 starts after installation: What do you do with all that information? To say the data collected is vast is to understate just how much there is. Experienced network administrators and engineers will find the information vital, but less experienced users will be overwhelmed.
Fortunately, Network Physics includes some pre-built applications with the Coordinator that will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. These applications can present graphs of traffic statistics, tables of networks, and charts of network activity. You can even drill down to specific servers or types of traffic if you wish.
Despite these aids, Network Physics should do a few things to make its appliance more useful, such as allowing users to change the appearance of their standard displays. Some of the graphs, especially the line graphs, used faint colors that were virtually indistinguishable. The color choices have improved with the current release of the software, but the user still doesn’t get to choose them.
Second, the NP-1000 can’t scale beyond its 400Mbps limit. The way the product is currently sold, you can choose to handle 4.5Mbps at the lowest cost level, 45Mbps at the next level (equal to T3 speeds), or 400Mbps. But if you have more network traffic than that, you’re out of luck. You’ll be forced to use the tap method, as we did, to get a sample of the traffic but not a complete look. According to a spokesman at Network Physics, the bandwidth limitations will be addressed in a future upgrade.
Third, as stated above, the learning curve for data interpretation is extremely steep. Only experienced network managers will be able to figure out what the appliance is telling them. Although the applications provided by Network Physics do help, they don’t help enough. The company does offer training both in using the appliance and in interpreting the data.
Finally, we had two operational issues with the appliance. On one occasion, the SmartProbe simply stopped working. When we discovered this, we had to ask one of the Cox employees to reboot the device by power cycling it. Later, the application called Dashboard stopped working. The Dashboard application is supposed to provide you with an early warning of network quality problems, but the Cox network was so clean there was nothing for Dashboard to do. Still we were troubled by the failure.
Overall, the Network Physics NP-1000 may be one of the best management tools available for high-traffic Web sites. The appliance gives you a previously unavailable look into the Internet cloud, allowing you to give your customers the best possible experience with your Web site. Even better, it allows you to monitor the many performance issues that affect your network, even if those issues are happening outside of your network. But the NP-1000 in its current form requires a highly skilled and experienced user, and its bandwidth limits make it less useful than it should be.
