TruView Reviews

We develop our applications in-house to address our organization’s specific mission and operational needs. The data housed within these applications are critical to us, as evidenced by a spike in incoming technical support calls immediately after any network, application, or database outage.

Application and network issues would inevitably arise within our infrastructure. These issues, no matter how minor, were hard to troubleshoot since each application integrates with multiple data sources. We evaluated multiple network monitoring solutions. Visual TruView was selected and deployed to solve our IT challenges and resolve the ambiguity associated with technical support calls.

As TruView processes network performance analytics, it time correlates the results, which helps cross-functional IT teams—such as network engineering and application development teams—work more collaboratively and solve problems faster than before without the usual finger-pointing. The effort is centralized with a dashboard that tells us whether the problem is database, application, or network related so we can assign accountability and get to a solution faster.

The ability to see across our network and monitor each node along with all applications and databases is of great benefit, it helps us immediately identify the problem’s root cause so we can bring in the appropriate service team to solve the issue.

Deployment was rather simple, but did require quite a bit of time to configure since our applications are so complex. But, once we got it up and running, the results were almost immediate.

It also provides ongoing monitoring for external and third-party applications as well. TruView can easily pinpoint problems, letting us know if the issue lies internally or with the external application provider.

For example, we used TruView to troubleshoot a third-party application that was performing slowly over the VPN connection. The application used specific protocols for querying data from multiple sources. We reviewed all data transactions – one after another. In each transaction, data took no more than 30 milliseconds to process. Some of the files, however, exceeded 15 MB in size. These larger data calls required several minutes to process over the VPN. Because we could isolate the specific data call culprits, the system could be optimized to solve the issue quickly and effectively.

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Our IT department is responsible for maintaining key systems and applications for all corporate locations, more than 500 stores across the U.S., and the e-commerce retail websites. Not having insight into these key applications and the underlying network infrastructure that supports them meant teams were always in a reactive mode when isolating and fixing problems.

As a member of the networking team, we’re responsible for monitoring performance of more than 100 custom applications, store circuit performance, database applications, key business applications like Exchange and Lync, client access, vendor networks and more. If we can’t access the needed network and application performance data, we can’t isolate and fix the problem. Teams just finger point and the guesswork begins to try and isolate root cause. And the worst part, while this is happening, the business is being negatively impacted.

As a matter of fact, during the holiday season, our online retail site experienced sporadic performance issues. Without solutions in place to proactively monitor performance, the IT department struggled to isolate what was causing the problem.

We knew this could never happen again, and it was the tipping point for us to find a solution to help solve the problem. We needed complete insight into the application performance layer so we could identify if it was a network or application issue. We also needed the ability to generate hourly reports for key executives and managers so they could monitor site performance.

In a nutshell, our company lacked visibility into network and application performance. If you can’t see it, you can’t manage, which means when problems happen, you can't easily fix them. This creates a big problem for IT and a bigger problem for the business. We needed to take off the blinders so IT could become a strategic resource.

To meet these challenges, we selected Fluke Networks’ Visual TruView, a unified application and network performance monitoring and troubleshooting appliance. It leverages key data sets such as stream-to-disk packet storage, application response time, transactional decode, NetFlow and SNMP, to present performance analytics through a single visual dashboard view. It eliminates the need for swivel chair correlations and gives teams the ability to quickly drill down into packet-level details if needed. With intuitive guided workflows, we’re never more than a few clicks from isolating performance problems.

There are only two solutions I keep up and running at all times, and Visual TruView is one of them. It gives me complete visibility into the application layer and when problems emerge, I can identify the source and work to fix it before it has an impact on the business. We can monitor all of our key sites and applications easily, immediately see if and where a problem is occurring, drill down into extensive details if needed, and isolate and fix the issue in real-time. It’s our eyes and ears for the network, and it’s made the engineering team shine.

Since deploying Visual TruView, our IT team now has complete visibility into application performance and can proactively manage the network.

TruView has allowed us to completely revamp site performance for the website. We use the full map view to manage all sites and can easily see when performance is degrading or if there is an outage – and immediately identify if it’s an application or networking issue. The information is easy to process and the search function allows us to quickly get graphs for usage, top conversations and more.

To make sure the networking team keeps on top of all performance issues, we created custom monitors and hourly reports that automatically get pushed to key team members and executives. This helps track everything from general performance data for key business applications to site transactions associated with e-commerce. If an issue emerges, the teams can instantly work to remediate.

From the moment TruView went live we had instant visibility into pressing issues and were able to immediately fix problems and do application rollups. And while the networking team owns access, we also provide access to the application team so they can instantly work on response time issues and drill down into individual connections that may be causing the problems. No more finger pointing, just data that helps isolate and fix a problem.

We also find Visual TruView simple to use. I can easily set alarms for application performance, site performance, network performance and more. There’s no need to manually correlate data and I can instantly prove or verify if a problem was the result of a networking issue.

The workflow is very logical and easy to use, and because it pulls all the data sources we need, we can get as granular as needed to isolate an issue. Every night it seems some issue occurs, whether that’s a server failure or a sales query, and TruView makes it easy to log in, put in a source destination and get results on any activity and how it impacted performance. It’s a critical tool for our day-to-day management of performance.

I can't imagine doing my job without Visual TruView. Previously we couldn’t provide concrete answers on performance issues. Now we can…and with extensive detail, which allows us to prove the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of a problem.

With a team of just three engineers and a network spanning the country, we required a solution that provided support for each location’s specific data centers, servers and storage without requiring a vast amount of engineering support. With hundreds of people on the network at any given time, identifying and troubleshooting end-user delays was an important and time-consuming issue for our engineering team. We needed visibility into each data center and the ability to quickly identify and segregate network issues from application problems.

With such a small team of engineers managing all the networking needs — from plugs, to wiring, to power — it was challenging for us to dedicate the required amount of time to troubleshooting end-user issues, especially with a user base spread across the country. It was nearly impossible for us to tell where an issue was coming from; was it a network problem? A smaller location based issue? We just didn’t have the visibility we needed to fix issues efficiently and still have time to dedicate to our other pressing projects.

In addition to normal internal network issues, we utilize many different applications throughout our three data centers, including a newly implemented video over IP capability that allows our geologists to stay on site and still participate in key company meetings. Because of the large number of internal and external applications running at any given time, in any location, our engineers were tasked with solving issues without any clear knowledge of the origin – whether network or application based.

Often problems would arise in Tulsa that had to be diagnosed and fixed from a different location. A large building and hundreds of different devices connecting to the server at any given time hindered the troubleshooting process and often non-vital issues were left unresolved and became the new normal end-user experience.

Our team also faced the challenge of managing third party, subscription-based applications that weren’t always performing up to standard. Conversations with vendors yielded few results and most users were left dealing with a slower, less efficient process.

We chose Fluke Networks OptiView XG to begin monitoring our biggest data center, located in Tulsa. The OptiView XG allowed our engineers to track the normal network use levels and establish a benchmark to compare degraded performance to. Currently, we use the OptiView XG mainly as a diagnostic tool, running continuously and conducting network assessments, validating new infrastructure and devices, testing service provider SLAs, and troubleshooting problems from end to end.

After our success using the OptiView XG, we expanded our Fluke Networks’ product line to include the Visual TruView. With TruView’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) combined capabilities, we are able to identify, test and resolve issues across LAN, WAN or Cloud environments and across multiple data centers.

The entire team tested several different product solutions initially, but Fluke Networks provided the visibility we needed to make a discernable difference in our network performance and engineer time management. With the TruView, we’re able to identify an issue, zero in on the location and solve it quickly.

With the TruView and OptiView XG helping to streamline our networking troubleshooting process, our engineering team now has the ability to remotely identify, diagnose and resolve our connectivity problems.

Using Fluke Networks TruView and the OptiView XG together allow us to shed light on issues that pop up when managing a cross-country network. It gives the entire team insight we’ve never had before and enables us to differentiate between normal traffic and bigger problems. It’s a great tool for not only day-to-day network monitoring, but also troubleshooting and effectively leading us to issue resolution.

In one specific example, my team was called in to deal with an application problem reported by a group of users in Tulsa. It turned out the users were all on the 14th floor of the same building. The IT team first used the OptiView XG to eliminate some obvious potential causes with the network on that particular floor and then used TruView to see how the performance on that floor compared to other floors. With the network ruled out as the cause of the issue, TruView helped to identify a file server that had been configured improperly after a power outage.

In addition to dealing with our own internal network issues, Fluke Networks’ tools have allowed us to help identify and resolve third-party application issues as well.

In one instance, using the OptiView XG, our engineers were able to log into an end user’s machine, take a packet capture then decode it using Fluke Networks ClearSite Analyzer software, which showed specific metrics around application performance.

The data showed an application problem that was a surprise to the vendor. While they were able to fix the problem and improve the end user experience, without the conclusive data provided by the Fluke Networks tools, we may have been lost in an endless cycle of back-and-forth between the internal team and the application company.

Without Fluke Networks, we just wouldn’t have the same visibility. It’s an essential part of our network infrastructure.

Recently, our government moved forward with a plan to combine two separate county councils into a single entity. One of the more complex tasks involved in the merger is the creation of a single, unified IT infrastructure for the county’s services and public-facing websites. The €1.8 million IT consolidation project includes the creation of a primary data center and disaster recovery site connecting to 57 remote county offices and sites over a variety of connections (point-to-point, VPN, private DSL, MPLS, etc.).

When completed, the network will include a mix of internal applications, public-facing websites and portals for services such as housing, water, roads, environment, planning and other key local government functions. In addition to standard business applications for communications, productivity, CRM and financial management, the network will also host some bandwidth intensive GIS and mapping applications. It will also support remote access and a variety of mobile services and applications.

Creating a single unified network across all of our county is a major undertaking. All of the merged authority’s back-end infrastructure will be located in the North of the county. As a result, all WAN services from the Southern part of the county are being relocated and re-terminated at a separate head end. Major sites in the south of the county will send traffic out through a switch core, up the point to point link to be dropped off in the primary data center core. About 800 users will be connecting to services hosted in the data center, of which approximately 450 will be from the southern part of the county.

The technical complexity of merging existing systems, applications and data was just one of my major concerns. We are especially conscious of the fact that users from the Southern part of the county are sensitive to performance issues in light of the division of labor and responsibility for the unified network. Being able to remotely diagnose and solve network and application problems is a priority.

We need a tool that can give us a complete picture of what is happening with applications, servers and the network across the entire county. Right now, we’re still building the network. But in the medium term, it’s important for us to be able to isolate the source of performance issues so we can get application problems on the desk of the applications team and network problems to the network team so they can address them quickly.

We chose the Fluke Networks Visual TruView appliance to provide the application and network performance monitoring we need. TruView leverages key data sets such as stream-to-disk packet storage, application response time, transactional decode, IPFIX (NetFlow), and SNMP to present analytics through a single reporting interface. As TruView processes analytics from these data sets, it time correlates the results providing cross-functional IT teams such as network engineering, application, and server teams with a new found ability to work more collaboratively and solve problems fast. We deployed TruView directly in our data center core.

With TruView you can get a high-level overview of what’s going on with a particular site or a particular application very quickly. It’s very easy to interpret. We can see which applications are having or causing problems. With our previous solution, it took much longer. And, of course, with TruView you can drill down into the data when you need to take a closer look.

I’ve been a user of Fluke Networks products for more than 12 years. We even had one of the earliest OptiView portable network monitoring devices which was extensively used across the network. So when it came time to choose a performance monitoring solution, I knew Fluke Networks could deliver.

We had no identified budget for a TruView appliance this year, but we could clearly see the benefits we could realise from deploying the solution. We managed to identify savings and re-prioritise some other projects within our budget in order to fund purchase of the TruView. We chose the TruView because it offered better value than the other performance monitoring solutions we saw.

Before deploying the TruView, performance monitoring was fairly manual. We’d used and were very familiar with NetFlow. With TruView, we have a much better view of application performance, particularly from the user perspective.

For example, we had an application response time issue with Exchange. TruView helped to isolate the particular server that was the root of the problem. As the launch of our unified network approaches, TruView has helped my team find “bits and pieces” of things that might have impacted application performance had they gone undetected.

Another recent example of practical use was an issue in which slow user logins were being reported from the southern end of the network. Using the TruView, within minutes we eliminated the point-to-point link, server side performance and end user response times and firmly diagnosed the issue to be local to the southern end of the network. This is exactly the type of scenario we knew the TruView could help us with. Prior to this it would have required an exhaustive search to figure out what exactly or where exactly the issue was.

As the launch of the new, unified network gets nearer I see TruView becoming even more useful. We’re looking forward to seeing how much more it can do. I don’t think we’ve taken full advantage of it yet.

Fluke Networks is a well known name when it comes to network testing hardware and devices. That being said, their Visual TruView monitoring software is top notch and one of the best SNMP/monitoring solutions I have seen.

I have used the competitors products in the past, namely WhatsUp Gold and others, and they don't even come close to offering what Fluke does with their product!

The way that TruView presents its information, via a HTML5 front-end applet with the visual and textual renditions of the data is superb, the dashboards are full featured and make it easily readable to even the entry level IT professionals. It helps you narrow down the problem areas quickly and efficiently, and drill in to fix the issue with little to no downtime.

From what little I've used this solution (I've only deployed it twice), it has quickly become my "go-to" for my clients when their in house IT needs a management solution, and especially when I am doing the management myself!

Like many companies in the financial services market, our bank has grown significantly in recent years through a careful strategy of acquiring and merging with other banks. Combining the networks of these separate organizations with overlapping and often completely different hardware, applications and third-party service providers requires us to have a deep level of understanding about how applications and services are behaving on the network and how users interact with them.

The network we manage is fairly typical of a company in an industry with a lot of merger and acquisition activity. It’s a mixed bag. We inherited some smaller networks that were not up to our overall standards, we have some aging equipment, and we also have state of the art platforms including a lot of virtual desktops and servers running on Citrix.

With a wide variety of service offerings for customers, we require a number of hosted and cloud-based applications. This large stable of applications presents a challenge when evaluating usage, rationalizing support and executing ongoing management.

We are also in the midst of opening a new data center in Birmingham, Alabama. This creates a major new challenge: identifying users that rely on specific applications in order to make the migration process as painless as possible. While we have a list of all the applications running on our network, we don’t know who is running them and when. We just want to be able to give users notice when we need to shut down their applications in order to move the servers that are running them into the new data center. But, without an easy way to see this data, the migration process has the potential to create a lot of problems.

The most common complaint that our network team gets is about a “slow network.” Users experience delays in opening applications and files or accessing data, and assume it is a network performance problem. Some problems were consistently occurring at the same time every day for weeks or months. I knew that these problems could just as easily be utilization issues, with applications creating large amounts of traffic simultaneously or at the wrong times. Unfortunately, our team lacked the ability to easily analyze utilization information.

We selected Visual Performance Manager from Fluke Networks because of its combination of capabilities, price and its ability to be a turnkey solution for a wide variety of visibility issues. This was something we needed yesterday, and Fluke Networks was clearly going to be able to come in and get us up and running quickly.

I was familiar with VPM from using it with a previous employer and knew it was the right tool to help us solve our challenges. In particular, VPM could play a key role as we consolidated networks and applications from a collection of separate and overlapping organizations.

One of the main reasons we purchased VPM was to give us visibility into applications and connections. We need to be able to map out an application to user connectivity and vice versa so that we were not blind to what was on our network. When we go forward with the consolidation of all of our applications, we need to ensure we’ve identified all of the users who are using each application so it’s seamless.

We saw the benefits of using VPM within days, as it was able to identify some unexpected disk-to-disk replication that was causing a network slowdown. In another case, VPM helped to uncover storage replication traffic between three branch offices that was also affecting network performance. The replication was supposed to occur over night during non-business hours, but was taking too long and bleeding into the business day where it impacted users. After using VPM to find the source of the slowdown, we were able to apply some QoS policies to the replication traffic to address the problem.

As we bring more of the responsibility for managing our network in-house, VPM’s ability to generate utilization reports is extremely valuable. In some cases, VPM can create reports that third-party vendors cannot. And with a small team – we have just 4 people managing the network across more than 100 locations – the ability to remotely identify and diagnose problems saves on time and travel costs.

By using VPM, we have been able to discover a number of utilization issues that affect network performance. It turns out that many “slow network” complaints are actually the result of things like traffic from automated updates to Microsoft Office applications and virus definition downloads. VPM allows us to identify those issues and apply policies that control when they happen.

And, VPM has helped me get a handle on the circuit optimization problem. By taking a close look at application and user behavior with VPM, we believe that we can significantly reduce the number of broadband circuits they require. In fact, the savings will be so great that I expect we will have payback on the purchase price of VPM within 6-8 months based on circuit optimization alone.

Looking ahead, I see VPM playing a key role in managing and optimizing our entire network infrastructure. We want to use application fingerprinting to ensure that business critical applications are consistently performing within target parameters and not being slowed down by network latency or server response time issues. We want to create an automated reporting system that will alert them if packets are moving to and from a server in a timely fashion. With a growing base of users and locations, we also expect to use VPM to uncover trends that will allow us to proactively add circuits to sites that are trending toward overutilization and better optimize key financial service applications.

Down the road, we also plan to bring some application development in-house. We plan to use VPM as part of the application testing and network validation process. We even envision an automated help desk process that would use VPM data to quickly identify whether a problem is network, application or server related.

VPM gives us a level of insight we previously didn’t have and will allow our team to work more collaboratively to solve IT challenges. It’s already proven itself as an indispensable system and the go-to resource when evaluating problems, planning changes or taking the pulse of the key systems.