This whitepaper examines the ever-increasing need for speed at scale, proactive analysis, and higher levels of accessibility, granularity and visibility, as IT managers strive to ensure uptime and rapid response in business-critical networks and customer-facing networks.

In the financial services industry, failed trades and an inability to understand why they failed within a reasonable period of time not only frustrates users and management, but has a direct impact on the bottom line. The same is true in the retail banking and insurance industry when understanding the failure of online transactions. Every minute of downtime is well quantified, and financial services firms know exactly how much money they are losing whenever transactions fail. Moreover, poor performance in customer-facing applications can lead to high levels of churn. In either case, performance degradation results in lost revenue, and brand damage.

Addressing these issues end-to-end or at scale however, poses a multitude of challenges, given that performance is the sum of the delay imposed by the network (servers, middleware, storage), the communications infrastructure (local and wide area connectivity), and also the way in which the applications running over them are written.