Network Instruments has announced that its Observer monitoring platform now provides complete visibility into and in-depth analysis of application performance and traffic within both virtualised and physical environments. The Observer platform is the first analysis solution to close this visibility gap and extend the power of real-time and retrospective network analysis to virtualised environments.

Observer's virtual monitoring functionality has been expanded to ensure real-time and retrospective monitoring of all physical and virtual network traffic, including that traversing between different virtual machine hosts and virtual machines on the same host.

All virtual traffic flowing within the host can be copied and sent to a GigaStor appliance for retrospective analysis, as well as sent to the Observer Reporting Server for enterprise performance reporting. With the performance management platform, engineers can pinpoint performance problems from the high-level reports and immediately perform root-cause analysis and resolve the problem.

According to Will Cappelli, research vice president at Gartner, "While server virtualisation is happening at a rapid rate, tools for managing application performance in these environments have not kept pace. In order to understand application behavior, one needs to combine data from the dynamically reconfiguring application layer, network layers and virtualisation layer. Traditional tools which assume that the environments remain static while an application executes are not answering the needs of the Global 2000."

The Observer platform provides visibility to all points on the enterprise network, at the edge or core, and/or within physical and virtualised environments.

"Companies often migrate to virtualisation to cut costs, but find the move opens up visibility gaps and therefore incur additional costs because traditional monitoring tools can't address the new environment," said Charles Thompson, product manager, Network Instruments. "Having the in-built functionality to troubleshoot and perform root-cause analysis in virtualized environments ensures maximum performance, network efficiency and that OPEX costs are kept to a minimum, whilst ROI is achieved quickly."

The Network Instruments Virtual TAP is a key component of the expanded virtualised Observer offering. The software TAP is installed into the VM host environment, where it can copy and send the data to the existing retrospective analysis device, analyser console, or a third-party purpose-built device. The TAP is available free of charge to existing customers with maintenance contracts.