Today's information technology is all about the applications. Networking professionals, as much as they might sometimes like to hole up in a quiet corner of the NOC, have been christened the "enablers" of technologies traveling across their infrastructure. The most important of these technologies is the business-critical application. Be it video, email or e-commerce, the networking pro has become responsible for ensuring that the application, as well as many others like it, is functioning at top performance at all times.

Network management vendors recognized this trend several years ago and began adding applications management capabilities to their products. Today, most fairly sophisticated network management software packages and appliances incorporate some form of applications management. For our awards program, this category included products that feature applications management as part of the basic package. We did not consider products that require an additional purchase, module or upgrade.

In addition to monitoring traditional network performance metrics, these products must be able to identify application traffic and distinguish between a mission-critical app and a recreational app, even if they are both using HTTP. They watch flow data and detail the paths and hops that application traffic takes to get from a user request to a back-end system and back again. The most advanced tools attempt to quantify the user's quality of experience – a measurement of the user's satisfaction with the application as a whole – rather than simply relying on round-trip times.

Readers responding to our 2008 Product Leadership Awards survey rated Sniffer Application Intelligence from NetScout as the best product designed to handle the dual job of measuring applications while also keeping tabs on network performance. NetScout recently acquired Network General, along with its venerable Sniffer and associated line of products. The Application Intelligence product, according the newly combined company, identifies commercial and custom applications based on their packet flow signatures, breaks out clients and servers to see who is using the network, and provides time intervals to help identify when problems and anomalies occur. It provides data on the source, destination, application, time and interface of conversational flows, allowing applications to be analyzed based on the metrics you deem most important.

Survey respondents found that Sniffer Application Intelligence's greatest strength overall was detecting network problems – 26% rated it excellent on that criterion. On the applications front, it received a slightly lower rating, with 21% of respondents calling it excellent for its ability to measure application quality or experience. The product also received high marks for measuring traffic against defined benchmarks, with – again -- 21% weighing in at excellent.

Susan Fogarty, Editorial Director