Oct. 7, 2009 (Business Wire) -- NetScout Systems today announced the availability of the nGenius® Virtual Agent software, extending critical unified service delivery visibility into applications contained within a virtual computing environment. As a virtualized implementation of the company’s widely deployed nGenius Probe technology, the nGenius Virtual Agent seamlessly extends high-performance packet-flow monitoring and analysis capabilities deeper into the data center and private clouds — enabling the IT organization to regain true end-to-end visibility of application traffic from within virtual servers.

As IT organizations are increasingly leveraging application and server virtualization technologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs and ease the environmental impact of compute resources, they lose vital visibility into the behavior and performance of the very applications that have been virtualized. What was once a rack of dedicated servers interconnected via network switches has now been consolidated into a single virtual server hosting many different applications with a virtual switch enabling communications between the virtual machines. While tools exist for managing the virtual platform, IT organizations have remained challenged to consistently manage, optimize and troubleshoot virtualized applications relative to, and in context with, end-to-end service delivery. IT staff needs a unified view into inter-application transactions and performance as it relates to end-to-end service levels and user experience that is consistent with how traditional application deployments have been measured.

“The consolidation and virtualization of servers has a compelling economic return and has driven the broad adoption of virtualization technology,” said Peter Christy, founder and principal analyst of the Internet Research Group. “The virtualization of simple applications is remarkably straightforward, but the virtualization of the more complex, business-critical applications has been much slower because of the need to also virtualize the subsystems and tools used to monitor and assure performance. NetScout’s investment in virtualizing their probe technologies assures that the important business applications they support are as visible and manageable in a virtualized data center as they are prior to virtualization.”

Seamlessly integrated with the nGenius Service Assurance Solution, the nGenius Virtual Agent complements nGenius hardware-based instrumentation strategies by reestablishing real-time, always-on visibility into virtual computing environments. The nGenius Virtual Agent installs as a virtual appliance on a virtual machine, consuming minimal platform resources. In the case of a VMware® environment, the Virtual Agent connects to the hypervisor’s virtual switch to reveal visibility for all application transactions within or across virtual servers. The Agent software automatically discovers all applications and their interdependencies within, and external to, the virtual server providing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), intelligent anomaly detection and comprehensive performance metrics.

Extending Always-on intelligent Deep Packet Capture
Consistent with dedicated Probe technology, the Virtual Agent supports short-term packet capture capabilities that can be initiated on-demand or in response to a pre-defined trigger.