Project Business Case and Capital Justification for Implementation of Application Performance Monitoring and Retrospective Network Analysis Infrastructure

Application Performance Monitoring and Retrospective

Network Analysis Infrastructure

Business Case and Capital JustificationMonday, April 10, 2023

Network Instruments & Ixia Capital Justification

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY..................................................................................................................................... 2

2. BUSINESS PROBLEM AND OPPORTUNITY.......................................................................................................................63. PROPOSED PROJECT OBJECTIVES/PERFORMANCE METRICS..............................................................................................94. BUSINESS RISKS.....................................................................................................................................................105. ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS........................................................................................................................................106. COST/BENEFIT/PAYBACK.........................................................................................................................................117. VENDOR REPUTATION.............................................................................................................................................13

Network Instruments a vision of network clarity and product excellence......................................................137. RECOMMENDATION................................................................................................................................................149. REFERENCE APPENDIX.............................................................................................................................................15

1. Executive Summary

The Client Enterprise voice, data and video transport infrastructure is the foundation upon which all IT application level services are delivered.

Performance issues with the delivery of business-critical applications cause deterioration in Client Enterprise's business performance in the form of both lost revenue and increased costs. Reducing mean times to repair “MTTR” by up to 60% over the traditional command line based reactive trouble shooting techniques currently used by CLIENT ENTERPRISE Engineers offers an opportunity to achieve significant cost reductions.

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When applications supporting key business processes such as Your Critical Applications and SAP (ongoing deployment) are slow or not readily available, revenue is lost, customer satisfaction declines, employee productivity declines and the Client Enterprise brand reputation is diminished.

Currently only the most rudimentary tools sets and minimal instrumentation exists on Client Enterprise’s network. Our operational efficiencies are impaired by following the current methodologies below.

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The Network Instruments solution presents an opportunity to eliminate significant wasting of time and resources in the fault identification and problem resolution process.

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Implementation of an application performance monitoring and retrospective network analysis infrastructure is essential to insuring the successful deployment of the ongoing approximately$ 20+ M SAP initiative.

Application Performance Monitoring is also essential in assuring continuous quality delivery for critical IT services including but not limited to Your Critical Applications application, DOT vehicle safety certifications, Voice over IP, Video (presentation broadcasts and security surveillance), email, file transport backup and restoration, SharePoint as well as general Internet access.

One key ability missing today and provided by an APM / RNA infrastructure is the establishment of end to end baseline performance metrics for IT resource streams and proactively alerting on deviations from those baselines. This enables the FTS Engineers to be proactive and get ahead of the curve in addressing impending problems, while understanding their scope.

Measurement and tracking of VoIP Mean Opinion Scores “MOS”, the ability to measure end to end quality of service “QoS” metric combined with multiple continuous observation points for packet streams that represent the user’s eye view provides the CLIENT ENTERPRISE IT support team the ability to precisely, quickly and proactively identify problematic components in the delivery stream.

The implementation of the Ixia packet capture aggregation switch presents an opportunity to service the CLIENT ENTERPRISE data security team’s needs for packet stream inspection and allow for savings of up to $ 100 k with the consolidation or elimination of Source Fire security appliances, while also enabling the APM / RNA infrastructure investments to be reduced by 50%.

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The ability to replay the actual transactions, in context with the performance anomalies, eliminates the time consuming process of trying to recreate the problematic (or unauthorized) user transaction thus significantly reducing support costs due to wasted time in focusing on the wrong problem domain and speeding forensic analysis.

2. Business Problem and Opportunity

As stated above Client Enterprise possesses several opportunities for improvement:o Layer 1 to layer 7 transport validationo Voice quality of service monitoring via Mean Opinion Scores (MOS)o Predictive trouble shootingo Reduce MTTR and increase MTBFo Improve capacity planning

Critical Needs:

1) Provide real time end to end validation of SAP user experience including network latency, server hardware, middleware and application level validation across all devices and resources involved in delivery of this enterprise resource including deep packet inspection and transaction replay if required to support the development team

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2) Direct point of observation for customer experience with JDD / Petrix allowing tracking and base lining application performance metrics, deep packet inspection and transaction play back to support customer satisfaction and development team’s efforts

3) Provide Client Enterprise with a packet aggregation and capture infrastructure that is extensible into the future and can be leveraged to consolidate monitoring tools, reducing the number of required ports, devices and associated costs in meeting all data examination requirements

a. This includes but is not limited to facilitating the Client Enterprise data security team by offering a potentially more economical alternative to inline 10 Gig Taps with current Source Fire IDS appliances for deep inspection of Internet packet flows

4) Implementation of application dependency aware monitors for general use, but business critical IT application resource streams presented in an integrated view which includes physical transport, circuit errors, circuit utilization, end to end quality of service and through individual users’ response times and is discreetly identifiable to the user involved

5) Provide the ability to establish and track baseline performance (latency) metrics, quality of service measurements, usage reports for voice, video and application service streams

6) Provide CLIENT ENTERPRISE network operations with proactive alerts on deviations from the established performance baselines before they are reported by the user community as business impacting events

7) Provide IT network operations with a toolset to more quickly resolve complex issues in the CLIENT ENTERPRISE network with synchronized and time correlated multiple simultaneous packet captures viewing problematic scenarios from an enterprise or global perspective with the ability to drill down into actual packet decodes if the situation requires it

8) The ability to replay voice and video conversations in order to hear/view the impairments

9) Provide network behavioral reports to utilize in capacity planning and the financial allocations justification process.

It is necessary for CLIENT ENTERPRISE to address these needs for three primary reasons:

1) To monitor the underlying foundation in real-time continuously validating it is sound to support the ongoing enterprise resource planning initiative

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2) Supporting Client Enterprise’s business decision processes requires maintaining the highest quality voice, data and video communications achievable

3) Containment and reduction of capital and operational expenditures is necessary to sustain growth within the IT Operations department

In order to meet these critical business needs the IT Operations team strongly recommends the purchase and implementation of an application performance monitoring and retrospective network analysis infrastructure optimized with a packet capture aggregation switch in Client Enterprise’s primary data center.

Diagram of Proposed Architecture: (Full Size Diagram Attached In Appendix)

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3. Proposed Project Objectives/Performance Metrics

The project will have several immediate objectives and deliverables as well as several long term objectives.

Instrument the CLIENT ENTERPRISE Primary Data Center (within 1st 30 days)o Provide data capture and analysis capability for packet flows into, out of and

within primary data centero Inventory CLIENT ENTERPRISE applications flows and create initial performance

matrixo Generate preliminary application dependency mappings in Observer Reporting

Servero Vendor will setup initial performance views and reports and report templates for

VoIP, QoS, SharePoint and Email.o Templates will be created for SAP (to the extent possible) to provide end to end

views for SAP resource streams as testing and deployment progresses

Instrument the Client Enterprise corporate headquarters network, TX Site-01 and TX Site-02 and Site-03 (within 2nd 30 days)

o Provide data capture and analysis capability for packet flows into, out of each Client Enterprise facility to capture end user’s point of view from key locations

o Inventory end to end CLIENT ENTERPRISE applications and generate initial performance matrix for these critical sites

o Validate layer 1 through layer 7 for these critical siteso Establish “normal operations” baselines and setup alarms for deviations from

these baselineso Remediate any anomaly conditions identified by new applications dependency

mappings in Observer Reporting Servero Vendor training team will come on-site at CLIENT ENTERPRISE to train up to 8

CLIENT ENTERPRISE personnel with live CLIENT ENTERPRISE data on the CLIENT ENTERPRISE operational equipment

Long Termo Produce significant reductions in mean times to resolve “MTTR” operations

impacting network problemso Produce significant reductions in mean time between failures “MTBF” based

upon application aware trend lines that will enhance proactive trouble shooting and capacity planning in a number of areas with the net result of reducing occurrences of performance issues based upon resource constraints.

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4. Business Risks

The risks in implementing such products are limited but possible

Internal Risk Factors Dependencies on other internal system projects Inadequate staff resources Inadequate employee commitment and support Organizational readiness Improper implementation of Taps and Spans as precursor tasks

5. Alternative Solutions

Several alternatives to the Network Instruments and Ixia solution were examined however the Network Instrument and Ixia solution is judged to offer the best value proposition based upon examination of the following criteria: feature sets, ease of implementation, ease of use, vendor’s position in the market space, situational appropriateness, Capital Expenditure, Operational Expenses, and Total Cost of Ownership.

Alternative # 1 NetScout – NGenius 3900 and InfiniStream Solution (Not Preferred)o Based upon separately licensed moduleso Additional modules at additional cost would be required to attain the same level

of functionalityo Offering requires CLIENT ENTERPRISE self-installation with vendor phone

assistance onlyo Offering did not provide for vendor creating initial report set to fast track raw

data gathered into CLIENT ENTERPRISE specific actionable intelligenceo Training offering was not on-site at CLIENT ENTERPRISE, included only two

people for 3 days, required additional travel expenditureso Higher initial capital outlay, higher year over year maintenance costs and overall

higher TCO ($478,076.31)

Alternative # 2 – Riverbed / Opnet (Cascade, AppMapper, Unified Communications Xpert Plus) and Ixia (Not Preferred)

o Technologically would integrate tightly with existing and ongoing CLIENT ENTERPRISE commitment to Riverbed WAN optimization appliances

o Offers technologically very desirable feature set to manage and control the CLIENT ENTERPRISE Cisco Unified Communications / VoIP environment

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o Based upon separately licensed moduleso Additional modules at additional cost would be required to attain the same level

of functionalityo Significantly higher initial capital outlay, higher year over year maintenance costs

and approximately times the overall TCO ($900,426.81)

6. Cost/Benefit/Payback

1. 3 Year Total Cost of Ownership

The project would involve hardware, software and operational costs.

Network Instruments and Ixia Solutiono Capital outlay, installation, training $264,129.57o 3 Years maintenance $ 71,422.80o Total Cost $335,552.37

NetScout Solutiono Capital outlay, training $280,191.48o 3 Years maintenance $197,884.83o Total Cost $478,076.31

Opnet / Riverbed Solutiono Capital outlay, installation, training $574,399.00o 3 Years maintenance $326,027.81o Total Cost $900,426.81

2. Benefits

The combined Network Instruments and Ixia solution meets all of the requirements as stated while remaining within the business fiscal constraints and the opportunity statement in all primary CLIENT ENTERPRISE locations (Datacenter, Fort Worth Corporate, Aledo, and Cisco).

The main exception to this is desired depth and manner of presentation for voice call detail records and remote control of phone handsets in Client Enterprise remote business offices.

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3. Payback

The payback period on the capital expenditure of $ 264,129.57 is approximately 230 days based upon the calculations below.

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7. Vendor Reputation

Network Instruments a vision of network clarity and product excellence

Network Instruments was launched in 1994 by a former rocket scientist and a product development specialist who recognized the need for superior network management solutions. Their shared vision was to build uniquely effective network products that integrate customer needs and feedback, while raising the benchmark on quality.

In a marketplace of product acquisitions, Network Instruments made the decision to take ownership of each product decision by developing all products in-house – from concept through delivery. Centered on the company's unique distributed network architecture, each product functions as part of a seamlessly integrated holistic management solution.

Thoma Bravo a Private Equity firm owns a 51 % interest in Network Instruments

http://www.thomabravo.com/portfolio/all/current/

Network Instruments has was starting in 1994 and without any acquisitions through just organic growth has been profitable since its Inception.

http://www.networkinstruments.com/about/index.php

Network Instruments has audited financials but are only available in specifically agreed upon circumstances.

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http://www.networkinstruments.com/about/index.php

http://www.thomabravo.com/portfolio/all/current/


Utilized by many Fortune 500 Companies

7. Recommendation

Based on feedback from discussions, evaluations of vendor presentations and collaboration with IT operations team members we recommend going with Network Instruments and Ixia solution to implement an application performance monitoring and retrospective network analysis infrastructure.

Implementation of this technology on a digital transport infrastructure is analogous to your doctor being able to draw a blood sample, then having the ability to process the sample in an in office lab so that he or she may know the patient’s cholesterol levels, potassium levels, lipids and triglyceride counts and blood gas numbers before the patient leaves the office so if a problem is detected intervention is not delayed in situations where time is of the essence.

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9. Reference Appendix

Network Instruments Presentation

Ixia Presentation

Tolly Group Results

http://www.networkinstruments.com/resources/videos/observer-16-apm.php

Network Instruments and Ixia Quotes

NI Statement of Work

Network Packet Capture and Aggregation Infrastructure Diagram

NetScout Competitor Quote

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Project Business Case and Capital Justification for Implementation of Application Performance Monitoring and Retrospective Network Analysis Infrastructure

Technology

client enterprises network

vision of network clarity

client enterprise engineers

performance anomalies

performance issues

delivery of business

business problem

asyour critical applications