During the past 10 years, companies have made significant investments to configure robust networks to support burgeoning applications, transactions and communications over the Internet. Yet, the majority of tools to support network operations have been focused on internal Local Area Networks (LANs), despite the demand to support external business applications. As a result, global networks have been managed locally without a clear picture of performance, operational requirements, the allocation of network resources, and affiliated costs across multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Further, the internal hardware, software and traps, typically used in the prior art to gather data has only limited out-of-the-box functionality to monitor, alert, analyze and report on applications, equipment and Internet Service Provider (ISP) performance and costs across diverse network segments that today make up an enterprise's global network, such as data (including Internet Protocol (IP)), wireless (including Wireless Access Point (WAP) access and equipment), voice (including Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)) and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Different sets of tools have been required to monitor unique applications, different network segments, service providers and affiliated costs. As a result, executives and operational personnel responsible for these various IT assets have lacked global enterprise visibility to comprehend the use, performance and costs of these intertwined systems.
Accordingly, there is a need to gauge the performance of global networks, including application usage, ISP quality of service, and device performance from a single dashboard across a multi-vendor environment.
The present invention answers this need by enabling clients to remotely monitor disparate networks, service providers, and applications in a multi-vendor Wide Area Network (WAN) without displacing internal management applications.