Single Pane of Glass – Network Performance Management: LiveAction

The Silicon Review

“Tremendously powerful tool for improving efficiency.” – Scott Wilson, CISCO

The best-of-the-best are committed to excelling at doing the “work” of business. What defines this determination to win is tackling the difficult or unpleasant tasks of business head-on. Just like profitability, excellence is an outcome. Leaders and companies that master the discipline of excellence stand out from the crowd. LiveAction provides solutions to enable companies to achieve excellence in their network performance. Founded in the year 2007, LiveAction provides IT visualization and analytics solutions designed to simplify network management for the Enterprise. LiveAction is used by the Global 2000 to manage and monitor their worldwide networks. LiveAction’s software, LiveNX, features patented network visualization, real-time big data analytics and deep control of routers, switches and firewalls for achieving an unparalleled network experience.

In Action
LiveAction’s LiveNX is a network performance management solution to help simplify the complexity of monitoring, analyzing, and configuring technology initiatives such as: Network and Application Performance, Cloud Adoption, and SD-WAN. It provides a comprehensive end-to-end vision into the network to accurately perform configuration changes that is unique within the industry. It enables users to quickly gain a deeper understanding, greater visualization, and a higher performing network, while decreasing the total cost of ownership. LiveNX fills growing gaps faced by IT departments for both the public sector as well as private sector enterprises across a variety of industries, including Government, Education, Healthcare, Financial Services, Transportation, Energy, Utilities, Professional Services, Technical Services, Manufacturing, Retail, Media and Entertainment, and Hospitality. Its features focus on QoS management of video, voice, and critical applications by building a highly interactive mental model of the network. Maps of devices create a visualization of the network, from the intricacies of a single physical device to multi-layer topological information on connections, traffic, and routes. Network elements and links using color cues and graphic images indicate status and alarms.

The LiveAction Technology
Replacing complicated error-prone command lines with an intuitive graphical user interface, LiveNX includes rich visualizations of the network topology plus in-depth views of individual devices, interfaces, flows and routes. The topology view shows how flows and routes traverse the network in real-time and highlights any source of congestion. LiveAction’s engineering and support teams are located in Hawaii and California with sales offices in Chicago, New York, North Carolina, Austin, London and San Francisco.

Improving User Experience through Enhanced Network Visibility

Challenge at hand: A recent use case of LiveNX involved a school district with 255 schools and 175,000+ students in grades K-12, 12,000 teachers and another 13,000 support staff that are charged with educating their state’s students. The institution regularly administers Common Core testing across K-12 students via a computer-based assessment system. However, the inability to assure network performance under high usage periods led the institution’s IT and network teams overcome network issues before test days to reduce the possibility of network downtime. They sought a solution to tackle the problems impeding the success of this transition to online testing and cloud-based digital education.

LiveAction solution: The institution began testing the use of LiveAction’s solution, LiveNX, for network performance monitoring, and LiveUX for user experience monitoring. By utilizing LiveUX, IT and network teams gained insight into the public network’s impact on their cloud and SaaS-based applications. The institution deployed LiveUX private agents across every high school to generate synthetic traffic in order to gain detailed insights into student experience of the applications. The institution was able to run load tests to ensure network readiness and use LiveUX to see what the impact of these traffic loads would be on the end user.

Clear Results: With LiveNX, IT and network teams at this district were able to visualize and optimize the traffic within the schools. In addition, with LiveUX, they gained valuable insight into the end-user experience. This enabled them to quickly isolate and resolve perceived slow-downs in the network to ensure the success of over 175,000 students. Pinpointing the location, scale and scope of user experience issues has significantly reduced potential downtime and lost productivity. Ultimately, through the integration of LiveNX and LiveUX, IT and network teams throughout this district are able to simplify overall operations and instill confidence across all schools within their district.

Man in Action

Darren T. Kimura, President, CEO and Chairman: accomplished technology executive with more than 20 years of experience in 23 countries. He is an inventor with 14 patents; he oversaw the acquisition of more than $2 billion in contracts, raised over $80 million in venture capital and private equity, and over $100 million in project financing. Darren has led key strategic initiatives such as preparing for Initial Public Offerings and Mergers and Acquisitions by organizing teams, advocating intellectual properties, and leading strategic engagements with Fortune 500 companies. In 2002 he was recognized as the Small Business Administration Young Entrepreneur of the Year for California, Oregon and Washington. He has a BA degree from the University of Hawaii where he studied Computer Sciences and Business and attended Portland State University where he studied electrical engineering.