Application Performance Management and QoS

Course Overview

Today's networks need to successfully support a wide variety of applications ensuring that the performance of business critical systems is not impacted by applications such as casual web browsing, printing and email. A variety of techniques are now available from multiple vendors including compression, QoS, traffic control, caching, acceleration, etc.

This course includes both theoretical discussion and practical hands-on sessions, and considers a variety of both the hardware and software tools and devices for analysis/reporting and for management/control that are available today.

Audience

Anybody who requires a good understanding of how application traffic utilises networks, how to ensure that business objectives are successfully met, and an understanding of the myriad of performance enhancement solutions available today.

Skills Gained

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Identify the issues caused by utilising a single infrastructure, particularly over the wide area, to support a variety of application types, and the potential consequences of doing so.
• Identify the causes of application performance issues and use a variety of tools to analyse utilisation and device performance.
• Describe generic and specific traffic type characteristics and the requirements of business critical systems.
• Describe the variety of performance enhancing tools available today, such as dedicated application traffic management devi ces, router based QoS, compression, caching, etc.
• Devise a strategy to ensure that application traffic is successfully managed and controlled, and that available network bandwidth is sufficient to support all applications.

Prerequisites

Students should have a good understanding of general networking principles. An appreciation of traffic characteristics will be an advantage.

Course Outline

• The cause of network and application performance problems
• Traffic characteristics and requirements (generic and specific applications)
• Analysing and monitoring performance - tools and interpretation
• Performance enhancement and control strategies - tools and appliances available today: QoS, compression, acceleration, caching, etc.
• Planning to support a new application without increasing bandwidth

Application Performance Management and QoS / GEN5012