Village Gamer

Calgary-based ASCI Connect has announced the availability of Network Monitoring Centre – A cloud-based network monitoring and reporting service that delivers comprehensive visibility into network traffic, delivered through the cloud to a single pane of glass. It does so across both single- and multi-vendor networks, ensuring high-quality experiences for users and all but eliminating help desk calls.

“We are extremely pleased to have reached this milestone in the development of the company and to be able to offer what we and our customers believe is the most innovative, user-friendly and cost-efficient cloud-based network monitoring and reporting system available in the market today,” said Dean Townson, vice president of business development for ACSI Connect.

Clear and Compelling User Benefits:

• Unified cloud-based network traffic visibility
• Real-time and historical traffic reports
• Multi-vendor network issue elimination
• High-quality user experience insurance
• Help desk call reduction

Visibility

Exponential increases in the numbers and types of applications delivered over the Internet combined with rapidly growing number of devices-per-user create significant reporting and management challenges for IT departments. Cloud-delivered NMC uses NetFlow v9, IPFIX and JFlow traffic data to provide comprehensive traffic visibility without the cost and complexity associated with deploying and managing appliance-based monitoring and reporting solutions.

NMC goes well beyond other NetFlow-based reporting systems that see all port 80 traffic as HTTP, individually classifying a wide variety of applications, including video and voice streaming, instant messaging, file sharing and email.

NMC features an attractive, highly intuitive and customizable single pane of glass online dashboard. This greatly facilitates collaboration among IT departments, executives, teachers, business managers and others who need to understand the ties between network resource consumption and user satisfaction issues. Based on the historical and real time reporting organizations are able to confidently greenlight IT projects or shift organizational priorities.

Real Time

While many network visibility and reporting solutions claim “real time” capabilities, meaning they can give you a “snapshot in time” of your network performance, how that snapshot looks and what you can do with it vary widely. “Clunky”, hard-to-read, multi-screen interfaces make it difficult to diagnose problems quickly and to share information with others, even when the data is “frozen” at a certain point in time. ACSI Connect NMC’s real-time reports present network data in an intuitive, attractive, easy-to-read single pane of glass, for quick diagnosis and remediation of performance issues.

Reporting

NMC generates real-time and historical reports on all network traffic, helping IT determine how to remedy issues immediately and keep them from happening again. NMC delivers unsurpassed reporting, in terms of both content and presentation.

ACSI Connect NMC reports deliver:

• Traditional NetFlow-based metrics such as source and destination IP address, ports and traffic volume
• Network response time metrics such as retransmission rates, network latency, compression and caching improvements, application quality scores and MOS scores
• Information including user name and application type
• NMC generates reports using the same highly intuitive data and display style as the NMC online dashboard, making it easy to read, use and share when discussing network performance issues and their remediation

Compatibility – API Integration

NMC was specifically developed to enable third-party solution integration through custom APIs. This ensures that no matter what appliances or other monitoring and management tools you may be using, their data can be seamlessly integrated with the NMC single pane of glass dashboard.

Customers Speak Out on the Benefits of ACSI Connect NMC

• “The ACSI NMC product gives us visibility into our WAN that our service provider simply cannot, often before we incur a network outage.” – Alberta Distance Learning Centre
• “NMC is my network insurance. Anytime, anywhere, I’ve got answers.” – Clearview School Division
• “(With ACSI Connect NMC), help-desk calls last a few minutes instead of an hour, and no one’s wasting time and getting anxious. I have the answers. It’s just a better experience for all of us.” – Peace River School Division
• “We trialed NMC based on a listserv and immediately joined in. We’re glad we did.” – Wetaskiwin Regional Public Schools
• “NMC provides us with an easy to use experience, and a complete breakdown of traffic, without having to spend time with long, tedious logs.” – Wolf Creek Public Schools Technology Services