Root Cause Analysis

When a component of a network infrastructure starts failing, it's important to discover the root cause of the problem—otherwise significant time and resource may be wasted "solving" the wrong issue, while all the time network performance and availability continues to degrade, potentially disrupting vital business services and operations.

NerveCenter's root cause analysis takes network event correlation to the next level. Based on event data from a host that triggers a potential alert, NerveCenter can be configured to query other systems in order to determine the most likely reason for the fault. Consider the example of a managed VoIP service. NerveCenter detects that latency between the relevant end-points has become unacceptable, risking degrading the service and violating a service level agreement (SLA). But why? Based on knowledge of the network's configuration, NerveCenter can be configured perform the following network root cause analysis:

	Query the VPN equipment for their states (e.g. are we out of tunnels?)
	Poll the intervening routers (e.g. is the router CPU saturated thanks to a denial of service attack?)
	Check the packet shaper (e.g. have we exceeded our bandwidth allocation for this protocol/customer class?).

If the problem persists, NerveCenter's network root cause analysis reports that not only that latency has become unacceptable, but also why. This enables smart, targeted responses from operations, hastening remediation and improving overall service quality. Other innovative applications of NerveCenter's network root cause analysis features have enabled users to control wide area backup telecommunications costs by preventing unnecessary dial-up service initiation, and enabling management of video-on-demand server management for high speed network providers.