Tracing an application performance issue to its source across today’s private, public and multi-cloud deployments can be a time-consuming challenge. Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) can help scale and maintain application performance and access at the server and application level.
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However, with applications and components spread across numerous networks, cloud services and geographic locations, network congestion may be just as responsible for application performance issues as the server.
Packet capture and netflow tools can provide some diagnostic help and relief, but these solutions require a fair amount of time, expertise and patience. In a hybrid and multi-cloud environment, tracing root cause often requires consulting multiple on-premise, network and cloud based tools and intelligence. In the meantime, you’re not only stressing IT resources, but downtime and performance may be impacting business productivity and revenue.
There is another way however. Some of today’s emerging application delivery controllers provide not only a single centralised ADC management tool across multiple cloud and data centre environments but also awareness of the SDN OpenFlow protocol and the network visibility and automation that it provides. By integrating with standard SDN controllers, ADC management tools can enhance application performance not only at the server level but the network level as well.
The diagram above shows how an SDN-aware application delivery controller architecture might resolve an application performance issue by detecting network congestion. In this example, the SDN aware ADC tool has detected traffic congestion between VBR 2 and 3 on port 2-3 to 3-2 on the path to the servers it manages. Once congestion is discovered, the tool instructs the SDN controller to redirect traffic automatically via another less congested route to by-pass the bottleneck and improve application performance.
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IT involvement is little to none and network related application issues are addressed and resolved in seconds or minutes, before they have an impact on the business. It’s a surprisingly simple and quick solution to a seemingly complex issue.Â