DPI and APM is a window to an enhanced consumer experience

Let’s begin with this new journey in the industry….

Application performance management, also termed application performance monitoring (APM) – was not utilized regularly, as it was unknown outside of IT operations, but now everything has changed.

As per a Gartner report, APM is anticipated to monitor about 20% of all business applications by 2021.

What falls under APM?

Anything related to collecting more data and understanding how applications, transaction times, dependencies, and even the code’s primary performance driving the applications is being monitored falls under the APM heading.

It is always said that APM is a diverse collection of tools that are exclusively used to measure application performance across varied computing platforms.

What is deep packet inspection?

Deep packet inspection, or DPI, allows monitoring the network and specific application traffic streams at a packet level.

In short, it is a process to find out what has been received and transmitted by a network device. Also, it is the most precise technique to:

  • monitor and analyze application issues
  • monitor associated risk level
  • regulate traffic in the best suitable way

With DPI’s packet-level analysis, it is easy to decide capacity planning and achieve better network performance and management. It also helps determine the leading root cause for performance-related issues with a complete traffic picture (including both application and network) in a single take. It offers service-type insights such as chat applications and voice and video communications, including response time metrics between client and server.

With DPI, one can:

  • Find out historical data from the reports and perform forensics.
  • By comparing NRT vs. ART (Network Response Time vs. Application Response Time), one can find a significant cause of delay on the network or application side.
  • Easily find out who is using your bandwidth and regulate them using traffic shaping.
  • Get the complete list of affected users for slow apps and communicate with them in advance.
  • Increase application availability and meet service-level agreements (SLAs).

APM with DPI – a complete picture

In the present digital economy world, application and performance issues could hinder business growth and profitability, negatively impacting user experience quality.

The key to assisting the consumer journey and ensuring flawless digital experiences is understanding every business’s health in real-time. So, this is why deep packet inspection (DPI) is a crucial technology to improve application performance monitoring (APM) solutions – as it allows real-time application and real-time network visibility awareness across all layers and nodes within the network.

DPI offers packet-level intelligence to APM solutions further that allows APM to go beyond the simple network management procedure and flow-based traffic monitoring to analyze performance issues.

DPI technology will play a magic role for service providers and enterprises by allowing them to extend application monitoring from simple performance tracking to a complete array of advanced diagnoses and analytics. It will also determine the root cause of performance issues, react to network slowdowns before they impact end-users, and detect inappropriate traffic and security risks.

APM and network performance management (NPM) are greatly enhanced with the inclusion of DPI capabilities. DPI enables one to isolate performance bottlenecks across applications and access points. For example, it could help users identify a device behind a network address translation (NAT) allowed access point (AP), causing bottlenecks due to active peer-to-peer applications.

How DPI lends intelligence for enhanced monitoring and management of applications

DPI extracts metadata on application, protocols, and application attributes. For instance, when a video is shared in a chat application, the network becomes aware of the chat app’s video. Further, it allows the network to apply various traffic management policies tailored to optimize network resources while maintaining the application performance.

Also, DPI offers detailed analytics on application bandwidth consumption and the speeds at each network link. Seeing security scenarios, DPI provides enhanced security by detecting cyber threats such as password attacks and malware attacks. This real-time detection of threats is allowed via an extensive DPI library where traffic signatures are updated at rapid frequencies by specialist laboratories to ensure that it contains fingerprints of the latest threats.

Some interesting facts about DPI and APM

How does DPI work?

A deep packet inspection tool comprises a dashboard that captures metadata about all pertinent application and network traffic, offering enhanced visibility into the system. The dashboard may include useful metrics, categorizations, and drill-down diagnostic tools to deliver further insights into performance issues.

Look inside network and application performance using DPI:

  • Enhance consumer experience by proactively addressing slowdowns.
  • Instantly view high-level packet response time metrics.
  • Catch non-business traffic and security risks.

Is the APM or NPM causing the slowdown?

Yes, and if it does, DPI plays an essential role in achieving an up-to-date overview of system traffic, thus finding out the root cause of performance issues, reacting to network slowdowns before they impact end-users.

How does NPM support deep packet inspection?

NPM automatically operates deep packet inspection on the devices and applications you choose. Use the easy step-by-step wizard to deploy both server and network packet analysis sensors on already-managed devices. NPM offers deep packet inspection management tools such as key metrics, filtering, and alerting.

Takeaway

DPI integration with APM offers actionable and concrete data about the performance of every aspect of an organization’s delivery system. DPI plays a painter role that sharpens the details with a more delicate brush and offers your organization the tools to optimize the consumer experience in a complex computational landscape.

In the end, we can say that DPI uses response time metrics for packets sent between clients and servers so that it gets easy for admins to regulate traffic flows and differentiate between network issues and application issues.

To know more about how DPI and APM could enhance your organization’s efforts, download our latest whitepapers on IT Infra.