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Market Definition/Description
This document was revised on 23 February 2015. The document you are viewing is the corrected
version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.
AppNeta
Founded in 2011, Boston-based AppNeta focuses on application performance monitoring. It
acquired significant intellectual property and an installed base from the now-defunct Apparent
AppNeta's core NPMD features come from its AppView product (for synthetic application availability
monitoring), enhanced with SaaS-specific monitoring for Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft
Dynamics and Office 365, Google Docs, NetSuite and athenahealth. FlowView provides traffic
analysis including both deep packet inspection and flow analysis. The unique component of the
offering is PathView, which provides deep path analysis along with patented capacity measurement.
Most of AppNeta's improvements to date have been focused on application measurement, and the
efforts are largely seen in the TraceView product, which provides APM for modern Web
applications. While the deployment characteristics of each solution component vary between little
(small physical or software appliances) to no footprint, the core analysis is done via a SaaS-
delivered portal. AppNeta does support on-premises deployments for core NPMD features as well.
AppNeta's NPMD revenue is between $5 million and $10 million per year. AppNeta did not respond
to requests for supplemental information and/or to review the draft contents of this document.
Gartner's analysis for this vendor is therefore based on other credible sources, including previous
vendor briefings and interactions, the vendor's own marketing collateral, public information and
discussions with more than 200 end users who either have evaluated or deployed each NPMD
product.
Strengths
Its full-featured offering, including APM and NPMD within lightweight SaaS delivery, appeals to
those wishing to experiment with technologies without large capital investment.
PathView's capabilities, including multiple appliance form factors and hardware/software
deployment options, appeal to those wishing to measure distributed networks and branch
offices.
AppNeta has benefited from the growth in SaaS use among enterprises; this differentiates it
from offerings that focus on packet or network buyers only.
Cautions
Management changes across several executive areas have resulted in a decreasing focus on
NPMD.
AppNeta is shifting its product and marketing focus away from network monitoring buyers who
represent a significant (if slower growing) portion of its current customer base.
The modules within AppNeta's offering are linked together, but they do not share a common
user interface or back-end data store, creating some fragmentation and inconsistency within
the offering.
Automic (Orsyp) NPMD revenue is between $11 million and $20 million per year.
Strengths
Cautions
The former Orsyp solutions are now part of a larger organization that has its primary focus on
other technologies, making NPMD an even smaller focus within Automic than it was under
Orsyp.
While Automic (Orsyp) conducts business globally, it has not yet broadly expanded its NPMD
installed base outside of EMEA.
Resources devoted to NPMD are limited for this midsize organization.
CA Technologies
CA's extensive history and product set for NPMD was built over many years of acquisitions and
organic development. Founded in 1976 and based in Islandia, New York, CA's R&D centers span
multiple locations, but are centralized in Fort Collins, Colorado, for core NPMD functions. CA has
CA's offerings for this Magic Quadrant are based on the CA Performance Management solution,
and completed with other offerings including CA Network Flow Analysis, CA Unified
Communications Monitor, and CA Application Delivery Analysis (ADA), which is focused on packet-
level inspection. If additional depth is needed, CA has a referral relationship and integration with
Network Instruments' Observer GigaStor product for packet storage and analysis. CA has other
products for physical and virtual systems and operating system monitoring. Data from the CA
components is rolled into CA Performance Management, which provides a single user interface and
reporting system across the components. When depth is needed, there are drill-downs into the
specific products.
CA's NPMD revenue is between $151 million and $300 million per year.
Strengths
CA's broad portfolio includes many functional areas, with a strong partner and internal service
capability to implement and maintain the solutions.
CA changed its development organization during the past two years in order to become more
agile to increase release velocity, providing point releases with fixes and new functionality every
three to four months.
CA's financial viability, and the fact that the company is public, shows there is limited risk to
business stability involved in doing business with the company. New leadership with a proven
track record of innovation is a departure from previous leadership.
Cautions
Cisco
Cisco's large hardware installed base across network environments gives it a large addressable set
of customers across verticals. With extensive software, Cisco provides what customers need to
manage a Cisco-centric environment. Founded in 1984, with headquarters in San Francisco,
California, Cisco is focused on moving from a network-hardware-centric company to include unified
Cisco's offerings include Cisco Prime Infrastructure (PI) for SNMP and flow monitoring,
configuration management, and provisioning Cisco hardware devices. Cisco Prime Network
Analysis Module (NAM) is an appliance-based solution (physical server, physical module within a
device, virtual machine) for packet analysis. The data can be analyzed via PI, and the NAM devices
can be managed centrally. Cisco Prime Collaboration (PC) provides monitoring, configuration
management and provisioning of Cisco's unified communications solutions. Cisco provides
workflows for troubleshooting, and focuses on integration with Cisco technologies along with
identity and access management.
Cisco's NPMD revenue is between $51 million and $150 million per year.
Strengths
Cisco is in a unique position to support its pervasive networking installed base. Its NPMD
solution goes very deep within Cisco technologies and has industry-leading support for Day 1
releases of Cisco hardware and software within the management technologies.
Flow generation by Cisco devices (such as Next Generation Network-Based Application
Recognition [NBAR2] included in Application and Visibility Control [AVC] 2.0) are among the
best and most useful implementations in the industry, supporting recognition and basic
performance monitoring of thousands of application types. This is supported in both the
devices and the NPMD tools, which leverage NBAR2.
The uniform UI across the Prime products makes navigation consistent across modules and
implementations.
Cautions
Central packet analysis is limited in Cisco solutions, since data is summarized off the NAM
devices. This prevents the capability for historical, distributed or deep packet analysis after
packets have been processed. The limited capability in this space is done via a dated user
interface off a specific NAM instance.
Cisco Prime product sets are often included in deals, and used for point solution management;
unfortunately, the support for non-Cisco devices is minimal today, requiring buyers to purchase
other management tools for availability and performance monitoring, including NPMD.
Analytics capabilities are limited; most of the product is based on reporting and presenting large
reports of metric data.
Corvil
Corvil's focus has historically been on the need for short-time-scale network monitoring, such as in
the high-frequency trading market. Founded in 2000, Corvil is privately held and headquartered in
Dublin, Ireland. It recently refocused on improving its streaming analytics platform for IT operations,
Corvil's NPMD revenue is between $21 million and $50 million per year.
Strengths
The offering can monitor large amounts of data at rapid speeds. This will appeal to companies
beyond Corvil's high-speed trading installed base, as concepts such as the Internet of Things
(IoT) are adopted into the mainstream.
Corvil's NPMD solution excels in terms of multisegment analysis and accuracy of packet
analysis.
Increased capabilities on analytics and integration with BI systems are a differentiator and
unique selling point.
Cautions
The user interface is geared to the highly technical network engineer supporting high-speed
data environments, limiting the speed of adoption and appeal to those less technically
proficient.
There are few "greenfield" opportunities in the company's financial vertical core. This will
invariably inhibit growth.
The company is still relatively small, but has fairly large typical deal sizes, making it somewhat
dependent on large deals as it moves to expand to a broader audience.
Fluke Networks
Fluke Networks emerged from Fluke Corp.'s network testing equipment for diagnostics capability in
2000. Fluke Corp. and Fluke Networks are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Danaher Corp. since
1998, but this will change given Danaher's October 2014 announcement of the proposed sale of its
communications business (including Fluke Networks) to NetScout Systems, scheduled to conclude
in 1H15. The first Fluke Networks product was the OptiView NetFlow Tracker, a network
troubleshooting tool. Fluke Networks' offerings have expanded beyond this initial focus, upselling
new capabilities to its large footprint of existing OptiView users. Acquisitions, such as Visual
Networks in 2006 and ClearSight Networks in 2009, expanded its NPMD portfolio, forming its core
solution, Visual TruView 9.5, which features distributed voice over IP (VoIP) and video monitoring
Fluke Networks' NPMD revenue is between $51 million and $100 million per year.
Strengths
Cautions
Fluke Networks' NPMD strategic road map remains unclear in light of the impending merger of
Danaher's communications business with NetScout.
Questions surround the extent to which Danaher has achieved technology sharing among the
acquired companies that form its communications business (VSS Monitoring, Arbor Networks,
Tektronix and Fluke Networks), translating to risks of resource inefficiencies and capability
overlap.
While the vendor continues to innovate, its ability to demonstrate product enhancements and
overall capabilities has regressed.
Genie Networks
Founded in 2000, Genie Networks targets its solutions for the communications service provider
(CSP) industry. Based in Taiwan, the company looks to provide scalable yet competitively priced
solutions.
Building from a competency in traditional SNMP-based network fault and performance monitoring
capabilities, Genie Networks also incorporates deep packet inspection and flow analysis into its
current offering, GenieATM 6.3.1. The latest features include support for MPLS VPN networks and
extended traffic analysis reports.
Genie Networks' NPMD revenue is between $11 million and $20 million per year.
Strengths
Prebuilt reporting templates support key CSP customer support and operations use cases out
of the box.
Attractive pricing and carrier-grade scalability should continue to stimulate enterprise customer
interest.
An appliance-based product form factor simplifies implementation, particularly in highly
distributed environments.
Cautions
Committed CSP and Asia/Pacific prioritization compromises adoption beyond these vertical
and geographical focal points, although the EMEA client base has almost doubled in the past
12 months.
The product's user interface, while demonstrating some new features, remains perfunctory
compared to the most sophisticated examples in the market space.
Analytics capabilities are basic, centered on automated baselining to support anomaly
detection and on security-focused use cases.
HP
One of the first vendors to offer enterprise network monitoring tools, HP has a long history of
investment in this market, and a substantial portfolio and customer base, particularly in network
fault management. Even as HP continues to maintain a strong market position, its customers
continue to express concern to Gartner regarding HP's focus, strategy and execution. HP's recently
announced split will likely result in little to no direct impact on NPMD strategy and execution. HP's
NPMD product packaging and pricing has been radically simplified over the past year. A key
component of HP's Business Service Management (BSM) offering, the NPMD solution is joined by
APM, event correlation and analysis, and other HP technologies to support availability and
performance monitoring. HP's NPMD solution is composed of the Network Node Manager i (NNMi)
v.10.0, available in Community, Premium and Ultimate editions, with each edition differentiated by
the number of types of included Smart Plug-ins, as well as HP Real User Monitor (RUM) v.9.24 (also
available in Premium and Ultimate editions) for deep packet inspection.
HP's NPMD revenue is between $151 million and $300 million per year.
HP's vision for the increasing role of IT operations analytics (ITOA) technologies in NPMD is
strong.
Data interchange, modeling and process-level integration with other HP solutions is robust.
The vendor offers a broad portfolio of complementary availability and performance monitoring
products.
Cautions
Usability is hindered by multiple, varied and dated user interfaces across the NPMD solution.
Customers report difficulty in implementation and management of the complex solution.
Implementation and integration of ITOA capabilities is not pervasive, both within NPMD solution
components and across the HP BSM portfolio.
InfoVista
InfoVista's history as a carrier-grade and large-enterprise-focused NPMD provider began in 1995,
based in Les Ulis, France, with a heavy physical presence in France. Offerings span NPMD, wireless
network design and planning, mobile network optimization, and configuration assurance. Product
offerings focused on NPMD include VistaInsight for Networks (which includes the Vista360 UI) for
visualization across the components in the solution. Those components are 5View Service Data
Manager (for data aggregation and analysis of the raw metric data, before feeding up to VistaInsight
for Networks); 5View Netflow (appliances that provide flow collection, supporting NetFlow, sFlow,
JFlow and Internet Protocol Flow Information Export [IPFIX] data sources); 5View Applications
(appliances that provide deep packet inspection capabilities); and the final module, 5View Mediation
(for collection of data from appliances doing packet and flow analysis for reporting purposes).
InfoVista is active within carrier-specific marketing activities, and contributes to standards bodies
for carrier services, such as carrier-Ethernet-focused Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), in addition to
TeleManagement Forum (TMF) and next-generation mobile network (NGMN). It focuses on the
service assurance component of the TMF framework, and integration with operations support
system (OSS) architectures.
InfoVista's NPMD revenue is between $51 million and $150 million per year.
Strengths
InfoVista remains focused on solution scalability, meeting the needs of some of the largest
carrier and large-enterprise networks.
InfoVista does carrier focus well, expanding offerings specific to those buyers, and increasing
support and capability of the products.
Flexibility of the InfoVista solution allows it to meet sophisticated use cases, which many other
vendors cannot meet.
Complexity within the InfoVista product line may result in long lead times in implementation,
difficulty with product usability, and typically high levels of required consulting often driven
by the need to meet customer-specific use cases.
Growth has been slow, since most customers are carriers and large enterprises, although
InfoVista has been introducing new offerings to complement existing product lines.
InfoVista has a heavy reliance on customers in EMEA, which make up 60% of its installed base.
JDSU's (Network Instruments) NPMD revenue is between $51 million and $150 million per year.
Strengths
Data- and process-level integration workflows are well-thought-out across the solution's
component products.
Network Instruments' recent addition of a network packet broker product (Observer Matrix) to
its offerings may appeal to small-scale enterprises looking for NPMD and NPB capabilities from
the same vendor.
Packet capture and inspection capability (via GigaStor) is well-regarded by clients.
Cautions
While significant business integration activities have not, to date, had a perceptible impact on
support or development productivity, this process is ongoing and now part of a larger business
separation action that could result in challenges in the near future.
NetScout Systems
Founded in 1984 and headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts, NetScout Systems focuses
almost exclusively on providing network performance monitoring solutions to customers in
enterprise, service provider and public-sector markets. Thanks to NPMD market growth, lengthy
market tenure and acquisition execution, NetScout maintains a sizable market share. NetScout is no
stranger to chasing growth and reactively extending its capabilities via acquisition (acquisitions
include Network General, Simena, Fox Replay, Psytechnics and Accanto Systems), of particular
interest is its recent announcement of its intention to acquire Danaher Corp.'s sizeable
communications business (which includes NPMD competitor Fluke Networks) in exchange for $2.6
billion of NetScout stock. Upon completion, the acquisition will increase NetScout's NPMD market
share, but at the expense of significant, potentially lengthy portfolio rationalization efforts due to
substantial technology overlap, complexity and the size of the overall acquisition. These efforts will
join ongoing and, to date, successful consolidation of acquired adjacent and developed capabilities
into NetScout's nGeniusONE v. 5.3 NPMD solution. The products comprising the NPMD solution
include nGeniusONE, the nGenius Service Assurance Solution (composed of nGenius Performance
Manager, nGenius Service Delivery Manager, nGenius Enterprise Intelligence, nGenius Forensic
Intelligence, nGenius Trading Intelligence, nGenius Voice/Video Manager and the Sniffer Analysis
suite), and nGenius Intelligent Data Sources (including both hardware InfiniStream Appliances and
Virtual Probes for data collection).
NetScout's NPMD revenue is between $301 million and $500 million per year. NetScout did not
respond to requests for supplemental information and/or to engage in Gartner's standard
procedures to address the contents of this document. Gartner's analysis for this vendor is therefore
based on other credible sources, including previous vendor briefings and interactions, the vendor's
own marketing collateral, public information and discussions with end users who either have
evaluated or deployed each NPMD product. NetScout has sued Gartner over the content of the
2014 NPMD Magic Quadrant, and that lawsuit is pending. In addition, as noted above, NetScout
has refused Gartner's invitation to engage in Gartner's standard procedures to address the content
of this Magic Quadrant.
Strengths
Niksun
Founded in 1997, headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, Niksun offers both network performance
and security products. Products exist under the broad umbrella of the recently announced Alpine
4.5, which is designed specifically for large-scale network monitoring. While offering appliances and
architectures to suit network infrastructures of all sizes, the vendor's NetVCR Alpine appliance
supports high-fidelity data capture and analytics at speeds exceeding 100 Gbps. Other products
include Virtual NetVCR (NetVCR for virtual environments), NetTradeWatch (which offers visibility into
the trading network environment), NetVoice Alpine (for VoIP oversight and administration),
IntelliNetVCR (portable NetVCR for field professionals), FlowAggregator Alpine (a flow traffic
collector) and NetBlackBox Pro (a scaled-down version of the appliance that is designed for high-
performance data capture and simple analytics).
Niksun has primarily focused on global service providers and other highly network-dependent
industries, including large financial institutions and defense and intelligence communities. The
vendor's current NPMD solution consists of the NetVCR family of products (for line-rate packet
capture and analytics).
Niksun's NPMD revenue is between $21 million and $50 million per year. Niksun did not respond to
requests for supplemental information and/or to review the draft contents of this document.
Gartner's analysis for this vendor is therefore based on other credible sources, including previous
vendor briefings and interactions, the vendor's own marketing collateral, public information and
discussions with more than 200 end users who either have evaluated or deployed each NPMD
product.
Strengths
Packet capture in excess of 100G and broad analysis support in recent releases allow Niksun to
maintain a leading position at high speeds.
Niksun provides interfaces to a broad array of large IT vendors including Microsoft, Cisco, IBM
Tivoli, HP ArcSight, Juniper Networks, Gigamon, VMware and Intel (McAfee), providing
customers with flexibility when using complementary solutions.
The vendor has a long history and remains an innovator at the high end of the market by
introducing new features before competitors.
Niksun is not positioned as a pure-play NPMD vendor despite innovation in the space. Its
marketing collateral leads first with security solutions, then with its NPMD solutions.
Market presence and messaging are limited, inhibiting growth potential.
Niksun's focus on the premium high end inhibits its ability to aggressively expand its installed
base.
Riverbed
Riverbed, founded in 2002 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, focuses on application
delivery, acceleration and performance monitoring. During the past five years, Riverbed has
assembled a broad set of performance monitoring capabilities primarily through acquisition. The
acquired technologies (from Mazu Networks, Cace Technologies and Opnet Technologies, now all
branded as SteelCentral products) have seen recent brand and product name updates to better
indicate support of both NPMD and APM, as well as relationships to each other. Further integration
and consolidation remains incremental and focused largely on the data interchange and analysis
dimensions, as the solution still comprises nine individual core products of varying delivery
methods; however, the solution continues to provide more than competitive technical depth and
breadth. The Riverbed NPMD solution includes SteelCentral Dashboards (previously RPM
Dashboards) v.2.3, SteelCentral NetProfiler (previously Cascade Profiler) v.10.7, SteelCentral
NetShark (previously Cascade Shark) v.10.7, SteelCentral Packet Analyzer (previously Cascade
Pilot) v.10.7, SteelCentral AppResponse v.9.5, SteelCentral Transaction Analyzer (previously Opnet
AppTransaction Xpert) v.17.0, SteelCentral NetSensor (previously Opnet AppSensor Xpert) v.2.0,
SteelCentral Web Analyzer (previously Opnet AppResponse Xpert BrowserMetrix) v.2.2, and
SteelCentral UCExpert (previously Opnet Unified Communication Xpert) v.5.0.
Riverbed's NPMD revenue is between $151 million and $300 million per year. The pending
acquisition of Riverbed by Thoma Bravo and Teachers' Private Capital was not factored into this
Magic Quadrant evaluation, as it occurred after the assessment cutoff.
Strengths
Riverbed's technical breadth and depth is often cited as a key positive differentiator in
competitive evaluations.
A focus on application delivery quality across all solution components is evident and useful,
particularly for those invested in other Riverbed offerings.
Multiple ITOA capabilities are utilized across solution components.
Cautions
Riverbed's NPMD solution is a visibly complicated combination of several unique and complex
hardware and software technologies.
SevOne
Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, by a serial entrepreneur and a
technologist, SevOne has maintained rapid growth to date. SevOne's NPMD solution consists of
the SevOne Performance Appliance Solution (SevOne PAS) and Performance Log Appliance (PLA).
The $150 million venture capital funding from Bain Capital in January 2013 remains the largest in
the history of the NPMD market. The SevOne PAS has gained a reputation in the market for its
scalability and flexible distributed architecture. Monitoring of Citrix infrastructure through the
ingestion of AppFlow records is another notable capability, although Microsoft Lync support is
limited.
In April 2014, SevOne acquired RapidEngines, a provider of log analytics solutions. SevOne
recognized the opportunity that such technology presented to network domain specialists, and, in
June 2014, brought to market its PLA product that enabled a single-click metric-to-log correlation
view. Other feature improvements include enhanced WLAN traffic analysis reporting, which
provides sound logical representation through an intuitive UI.
SevOne's NPMD revenue is between $51 million and $150 million per year.
Strengths
Integration of PLA has been rapidly executed upon, successfully adding value to the portfolio.
The patented distributed peer-to-peer architecture is highly scalable and facilitates a buy-as-
you-grow deployment approach.
A rapid flow analysis engine enables the highest reported flows and polling instances on a
single appliance.
Cautions
Rapidly expanding reseller agreements will dilute focus of resources dedicated to supporting
each channel partner, which, in turn, may affect the end users they serve. SevOne has
demonstrated an evolved channel strategy in anticipation of this impact.
While support for software-defined networking (SDN) is a strategic goal, no current capabilities
exist to support the SDN controller or SDN environments.
Depth into packet data is comparatively limited due to this component being an OEM offering of
third-party technology and based on flow analysis.
Added
Cisco Inclusion criteria concerning flow-based technology support have changed this year, which
now qualifies Cisco for this Magic Quadrant.
Dropped
Lancope This vendor has reduced its focus on IT operations and is increasingly aligned more
closely with security-oriented use cases and scenarios.
Paessler This vendor does not meet the scalability criterion of a single instance of the tool
supporting 10G environments at full line rate.
Please Note: While Ixia's Spyke product does support NPMD, the company announced in October
2014 that it would no longer be selling it. Therefore, it does not qualify for inclusion in this Magic
Quadrant.
Non-Product-Related Criteria
A minimum of 10 NPMD customer references must be included at the time of survey
submission.
Customer references must exclude security-oriented use cases and scenarios.
Customer references must be located in at least two of the following geographic regions: North
America, South America, EMEA and/or the Asia/Pacific region/Japan.
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Gartner makes judgments from a variety of inputs in order to evaluate the
capabilities, quality, usability, integration and feature set of the solution, including the following
functions:
Data source support, including application and network device log data
Behavioral analysis
Diagnostic workflows
Real-time monitoring
Day-to-day maintenance of the product
Ease and management of deployment and configuration
Ease of use and richness of functions within the product
Product deployment options and usability
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy and Organization): We consider the vendor's
company size, market share and financial performance (such as revenue growth and profitability).
We also investigate any investments and ownership, and any other data related to the health of the
corporate entity. Our analysis reflects the vendor's capability to ensure the continued vitality of its
NPMD offering.
Sales Execution/Pricing: We evaluate the vendor's capability to provide global sales support that
aligns with its marketing messages; its market presence in terms of installed base, new customers
and partnerships; and flexibility and pricing within licensing model options, including packaging.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: We evaluate the execution in delivering and
upgrading products consistently, in a timely fashion, and meeting road map timelines. We also
evaluate the vendor's agility in terms of meeting new market demands, and how well the vendor
receives customer feedback and quickly builds it into the product.
Customer Experience: We evaluate the vendor's reputation in the market, based on customers'
feedback regarding their experiences working with the vendor, whether they were glad they chose
the vendor's product and whether they planned to continue working with the vendor. Additionally,
we look at the various ways in which the vendor can be engaged, including social media, message
boards and other support avenues.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: This criterion evaluates vendor capabilities against future market
requirements. The market requirements map to the market overview discussion and look for the
following functionality:
Data source support, including application and network device log data
Behavioral analysis
Diagnostic workflows
Real-time monitoring
Virtualization (NFV and SDN)
Marketing Strategy: We evaluate the vendor's capability to deliver a clear and differentiated
message that maps to current and future market demands, and, most importantly, the vendor's
Sales Strategy: We evaluate the vendor's approach to selling NPMD in the appropriate distribution
channels, including channel sales, inside sales and outside sales.
Offering (Product) Strategy: We evaluate product scalability, usability, functionality, and delivery
model innovation. We also evaluate the innovation related to the delivery of products and services.
Business Model: This is our evaluation of whether the vendor continuously manages a well-
balanced business case that demonstrates appropriate funding and alignment of staffing resources
to succeed in this market. Delivery methods will also be evaluated as business model decisions,
including the strength and coherence of on-premises and SaaS solutions.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: We evaluate the targeted approaches in marketing and selling into
specific vertical industries.
Innovation: This criterion includes product leadership and the ability to deliver NPMD features and
functions that distinguish the vendor from its competitors. Specific considerations include resources
available for R&D and the innovation process.
Geographic Strategy: This is our evaluation of the vendor's ability to meet the sales and support
requirements of IT organizations worldwide. In this way, we assess the vendor's strategy to
penetrate emerging markets.
Innovation High
Leaders
The Leaders quadrant represents those vendors that are pushing the NPMD market forward,
including those with comprehensive portfolios and the ability to handle multiple application and
technology types. They offer a choice of hardware or software appliances for optimum flexibility.
Additionally, the use of SaaS delivery methods within portfolios gives enterprise IT teams more
choices, while making formerly premium priced NPMD solutions attainable by midsize
organizations. All Leaders offer a high degree of application-aware insight and visibility.
Challengers
Challengers consist of those vendors with high market reach and large deployments. Once leaders
in the network performance monitoring market, they are currently struggling to deal with new
technical demands and rising expectations. These established NPMD vendors bring a substantial
installed base, but also architectures, feature sets and pricing structures that require modernization
(often in progress) to better compete with those in the Leaders quadrant.
Visionaries
Visionaries have built a compelling plan to competitively address current and future NPMD
customer demands. The Visionaries are combining elements of APM, infrastructure performance
monitoring (IPM) and NPMD in ways that provide deeper visibility than is currently available from
other vendors. Presently, execution is limited either by insufficient market reach or by the extent of
existing tools and technology capabilities that are not initially designed, or able, to meet these
needs.
Niche Players
Niche Players are those vendors with solutions catering to specific audiences or with limited use-
case support today. They have often been unable to address the needs of larger enterprises or have
only done so within specific verticals or market segments. Each of these vendors is working to
appeal to the broader NPMD buying community, versus the targeted use cases they serve today.
With the right changes to their product plans, positioning and/or business execution strategies, any
of these vendors could successfully shift their differentiated technologies to address use cases in
ways that today's Leaders might have a hard time matching.
Context
NPMD solutions should be considered as part of a larger network management initiative, that is,
part of an overall availability and performance monitoring strategy. Utilizing these additional points
of reference will yield further unique criteria (such as existing investments, investment plans, vendor
In the course of this research, several key observations emerged that should be carefully
considered during NPMD strategy formulation and solution selection, including:
Products have been mostly stagnant. The use of IT operations analytics has not fully
materialized to date.
The potential for market disruption via alternative delivery models and innovation is high.
Ease of use remains an area that needs improvement and varies significantly both across
vendors and within solutions.
Virtualization and SDN support is minimal in most NPMD solutions.
Flow protocol support and actual flow data utilization vary significantly across vendors.
Pricing and product/capability packaging vary significantly across vendors.
On-premises appliances are the dominant delivery model, but software and SaaS offerings are
available (see Note 1).
Integrations with other ITOM solutions (even other availability and performance solutions) are an
afterthought for most, thus encouraging the use of these tools within the network silo.
Many NPMD solutions are assembled from multiple products, which can enable modular
adoption of NPMD capabilities, but also can add significant complexity to procurement and
ongoing maintenance.
It remains imperative that organizations purchase tools that closely match their current maturity
levels. It is now a reality that many network monitoring teams have yet to successfully make the
leap from basic, reactive network availability management to proactive performance management.
While tool investment can play a part in this maturation, it is clear that simply investing in NPMD
tooling without similar investments in training, integration and processes will yield limited results at
best. Gartner recommends that network teams assess their current state of maturity on a regular
basis, both individually and at the organizational level, to provide this perspective. To help, teams
can utilize Gartner's ITScore for infrastructure and operations (ITSIO; see "How to Improve I&O
Maturity by Using the ITScore").
Organizations should not utilize the Leaders quadrant as a shortlist of appropriate vendors, but
instead should build a list of criteria that describe their current and future needs, and then select
from vendors that best meet those requirements. Organizations should select a vendor that has
both a history of and future plans for focusing on this market. Careful consideration should be given
to required skills, training, process and deployment investments, because these factors will have a
much greater impact on the overall value realized from an NPMD investment than any specific
functional capability found in a given tool.
Increasing recognition that network traffic is a critical source of information about the behavior
of the holistic IT stack
Rising demand for network services and end-user expectations of their quality
Growing appreciation of the network as a critical component of IT services and as an agnostic,
trusted source of cross-domain availability and performance data
Exponential growth in application and infrastructure dynamism and complexity
Each of these shifts has pressured network teams to rethink their tooling strategy, so that they can
get the visibility they need to truly monitor and troubleshoot the performance of their network
resources in the context of the applications and services they support. A subset of the overall
network performance monitoring market, NPMD has emerged as a unique market designed to
address these very needs in today's increasingly complex environments. A fast-growing
subsegment, the NPMD tool market is currently estimated by Gartner to be approximately $1.1
billion in size.
NPMD tools provide this required breadth and depth of visibility in both real-time and historical
perspectives by uniquely analyzing data from all three of the following sources. Previous
approaches that only take into account one or two of the following data sources have proven to be
inadequate, so all three must be supported for a tool to be considered an NPMD solution (see Note
2).
SNMP Polling
Period polling is one method that looks to quantify network usage of network elements to gauge the
requirements of the infrastructure. Each network device has embedded agents that "speak SNMP."
These agents can then be interrogated with a polling-based approach, returning metrics from the
embedded agent. These collected metrics can be stored, reported on, analyzed for troubleshooting
or used for capacity planning. SNMP polling can also be used to gather information about hardware
or software errors (faults) and capacity data (for example, triggering an alert when a hardware fault
occurs, the device CPU is above a threshold or the interface capacity is abnormal when compared
to a baseline). Based on the metrics gathered, the network team can estimate the delta between
Flow-Based Technology
Summarized data is generated by the network devices, including characteristics of the IP
conversation between two network nodes, and these characteristics are embedded within flows.
Flow data is exported from the network devices to the NPMD technologies, which then collect and
process this data stream to provide insight into which devices and applications are consuming
bandwidth, how long the conversations are lasting, and who is participating in them. Since the data
is summarized, a degree of detail is removed to simplify processing and extract meaning from the
actual network data. Flow-based data does not provide details down to a specific set of network
packets going between the source and destination, and can have a performance impact on the
devices exporting flow data.
There are several flow collection standards, such as Cisco's NetFlow (v.5/v.9), Juniper's JFlow,
Huawei's NetStream, Citrix's AppFlow, Riverbed's Cascade Flow, the Internet Engineering Task
Force's (IETF's) IPFIX (which is based off NetFlow v.9) and sFlow from the sFlow.org consortium.
Vendor-derived standards are predominant, which hinders integration and comparisons. Flow data
collection is a function embedded in the network devices themselves. The device analyzes the
network traffic traversing from one interface to another, with the primary purpose of assessing
bandwidth consumption, and the level of data being sent and received between various source and
destination ports across the network. That data is then summarized into a stream-of-flow record
that is sent to the monitoring tools that collect and assess the flow records.
Additionally, the quality and granularity of flow information are always evolving. Many vendors
embed additional data within their flows, especially those implementing flexible record types, such
as Cisco's IOS Flexible NetFlow, which allows the user to configure the exported data format.
Example data embedded in flows contains wireless protocols, link aggregation, URLs, latency
information, and other application or infrastructure monitoring data. With such open standards in
flow technologies, the architecture varies between network equipment vendors, but most tools
collect and process the data regardless of the network equipment implementation.
Packet-Based Technology
Examining the current infrastructure in detail on a per-packet basis provides the necessary real-time
and historical visibility into volatile traffic behavior from "bursty" modern application types, like
today's chatty Web applications, unified communications services (such as voice and video
delivery), and the growing footprint of hosted virtual desktop (HVD) and virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI) technologies. Because only raw, unmanipulated packet data is being collected,
a vendor-agnostic view of performance can be preserved throughout the analysis. This approach
affords far greater insight and precision, but it comes with potentially costly (and for some,
impossibly costly) appliance or "probe" implementation requirements.
As the NPMD market continues to grow and develop, Gartner expects that future tool
enhancements will center on usability, advanced IT operations analytics and virtualization/SDN
support (see "Introducing the Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics Market").
Additional vendors are expected to enter the NPMD market, as well as over 30 vendors
participating in the larger network performance monitoring market, but they did not meet the criteria
specific to the 2015 NPMD Magic Quadrant.
APM
APM tracks the end-user performance of application components, and provides granular
troubleshooting tools for the application and its components. It provides this insight by monitoring
on five main functional dimensions: end-user experience (EUE) monitoring, application topology
discovery and visualization, user-defined transaction profiling, application component deep dive,
and IT operations analytics. APM differs from NPMD primarily in its focus on monitoring the quality
of the end-user's experience via application interactions across all application and infrastructure
tiers, including, but not limited to, the network perspective. See "Magic Quadrant for Application
Performance Monitoring" for further details.
NPBs
NPBs assist with traffic aggregation, visibility and overall management of the data being sent to
monitoring tools. Vendors in the NPB space often partner and collaborate with NPMD and security
vendors as a go-to-market strategy, resulting in marketing messages that can make it difficult to
determine which tool is actually performing the monitoring (network performance monitoring or
security) and which is facilitating the monitoring by managing the data to be monitored (network
packet brokering). We have also seen an increasing number of acquisitions in this space. NetScout
and Network Instruments, both of which are in this Magic Quadrant, pair NPBs and NPMD tools
together in deals. Other popular NPB vendors include Gigamon, VSS Monitoring, JDSU (Network
Instruments), Interface Masters Technologies, Apcon, Datacom, and switch provider Arista
Networks. See "Market Guide for Network Packet Brokers" for further details.
Unified Monitoring
Unified monitoring is a subset of infrastructure monitoring that relies on primarily agentless and API-
integration-based data collection methods to monitor the availability of servers, networks, storage
and virtualization layers. These tools also do minimal discovery, and acquire physical, virtual and
logical topologies and the relationships between them for the purposes of monitoring. They monitor
common application instances on OSs, perform synthetic transactions for checking Web
"Modernize Your Monitoring Strategy by Combining Unified Monitoring and Log Analytics Tools"
Emulex (Endace) The vendor did not qualify due to the lack of flow analysis in the offering.
Emulex (Endace) builds custom hardware and software solutions that provide detailed packet
recording, and offers associated monitoring software for those organizations with requirements
for high performance and accuracy.
ExtraHop The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to the lack of NetFlow collection in the
offering. ExtraHop's easily deployed appliances and deep visibility into applications and
network topology make it an excellent jumping-off point for those looking for an easy approach
to solving application performance needs.
Extreme Networks The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to the lack of IPFIX collection
in the offering. Extreme Networks' NetSight tool provides packet and NetFlow collection for
wired and wireless networks via a distributed client/server architecture. The tool also includes
policy, inventory and access control management components, which sets it apart from
traditional NPMD vendors.
Paessler The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to the inability to support 10G
environments at full line rate via a single instance of the tool. Paessler's PRTG tool provides
agentless server monitoring, network fault monitoring, flow monitoring and packet sniffer
technology to determine application usage. The solution is aggressively priced and is available
via a try-before-you-buy go-to-market strategy.
Sideband Networks The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to a lack of flow analysis and
sufficient customers. The company is a new startup having been founded in 2012. Sideband
Networks raised $6 million in Series A funding in February 2014. The tool ingests packet, SNMP
and log data, which is sent to an analytics engine that produces a topological and traffic flow
model and overlays application usage patterns. Sideband is adding support for common flow
formats in 1Q15.
SolarWinds The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to the inability to support 10G
environments at full line rate via a single instance of the tool. SolarWinds Network Performance
Monitor brings packet inspection and analysis capabilities via a distributed software-based
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the
structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation,
presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed
to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and
business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification
with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can
be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership,
word of mouth and sales activities.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors
include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences,
programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate
effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs
and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest
degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or
enhance those with their added vision.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of
direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend
the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the
customer base.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business
proposition.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to
meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either
directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that
geography and market.
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