If time is money, businesses can assign a dollar value to network performance issues if they know how many hours of work were lost due a network problem. That’s the thinking behind analytics software that measures and prioritizes the cumulative impact of performance issues experienced by all clients in a network.
Nyansa, a Palo Alto startup that first made its mark in the network analytics space last year, has now added the ability to measure what it calls “client hours.” During a single hour, if a user experiences any incident using a given service, the software records one client hour of poor performance.
The company said user experience will take on a whole new dimension as networks start to support more connected devices, especially in the healthcare arena. Connected heart pumps, health monitors and robots may be critical to patient outcomes, and remote monitoring will be important.
While network problems may not always mean the difference between life and death, they can often be the difference between profit and loss. Nyansa management believes that giving IT managers the ability to quantify network downtime will be a major productivity tool.
“Proactively quantifying network service, application or device performance and its impact on user productivity is the holy grail for enterprise IT,“ said Murtaza Zafer, director of analytics at Nyansa.
The goal of precision analytics software is to tell IT managers exactly where the network is struggling, and how many users are being impacted. This empowers IT departments to tackle the problems with the greatest return on investment. For example, if one router is causing 85% of lost client hours, it probably makes sense to address that issue ahead of any others that might be reported.
Nyansa is one of several startups leveraging the ability of cloud-based servers and software to track and analyze Wi-Fi networks. Purple Wi-Fi, KodaCloud and Cloud 4Wi are among the other startups that are offering cloud-based Wi-Fi services.
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