Q&A: Network Performance Monitoring with Statseeker
In this Q&A, James Wells, head of product at Techniche, explains how Statseeker differs from other Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) products and what customers value most about Statseeker.
Tell me about Statseeker. What does Statseeker do that other NPM products can’t?
The major difference between Statseeker and other NPM products is its ability to store high-quality, as-polled data over a long period of time. Statseeker stores data at a granular level that other products can’t match, and it’s one of the main reasons our customers choose Statseeker.
As Statseeker never averages your data, customers can be certain that when they’re looking at data from, let’s say, six months back, the information they see is the exact data polled at that time, in full. This is essential for accurate capacity planning or trend analysis. Other NPM products have shorter data retention cycles, and over time, stored data is averaged or rolled up. This significantly reduces the value of your data.
Statseeker also retrieves your data very quickly; it delivers near-real time access to your data, even across long reporting periods. There’s no waiting around for your reports to load, they’re produced in seconds.
Which type of organization is Statseeker especially suited to?
Our Statseeker customers are typically medium to large enterprises. Organizations with large, distributed, complex network environments, with a need for data collection at scale from a single point, find Statseeker invaluable.
It’s easy to install, upgrade, and administer and doesn’t need a team of engineers to look after it. Automation features in the product remove the need for a lot of repetitive tasks, and it also comes with a great selection of out-of-the-box reports and dashboards.
Cost is always a factor, even for large enterprises, and our customers tell us that Statseeker is good value compared to other products.
What do Statseeker customers value most about Statseeker?
Above all, it’s the high-quality data storage and speed of data retrieval that makes Statseeker so valuable to its users. But we also know that our customers rate our support highly. They commend us for our speed of response and our understanding of their organizations. We prefer to talk to our customers rather than rely on email or other online communications. It’s important that we get to know our customers, and the fact that we know many of our customers by their first names shows we really put this into practice.
Statseeker customers trust the product. It’s stable and reliable. And because Statseeker never averages polled data, customers also know that Statseeker data is accurate and that they can be confident using the data to inform their operational business decisions.
Customers also appreciate the high level of custom reporting and dashboarding that’s possible with Statseeker. Network professionals tell us how powerful the dashboarding features are in terms of providing views and contextual data for different operational functions – whether they want to see what’s happening at a particular site or network wide. Network managers can build workflows, or our team will help them with this, that switch from a global view of the network to a specific device in just three clicks.
In fact, because our dashboards are so configurable, many customers are bringing data into Statseeker from other products, to display and work with that data in the Statseeker dashboard format.
Where does Statseeker fit in an enterprise technology stack?
That’s a great question. Some customers use Statseeker alongside their existing network performance monitoring product suite, to provide specific functionality that the other products don’t have, or that Statseeker does better.
For example, many enterprise customers use Statseeker for niche requirements, such as ping polling or interface monitoring at large scale.
Other customers chose Statseeker for the complete, granular network performance data it provides.
Statseeker’s core functionality – that is, the polling, storage, and retrieval of high-quality network performance data which is never averaged – can’t be beaten.
Why should organizations choose Statseeker over an open source solution?
On the surface, open source solutions can often appear to be a lower cost option. However, there are well understood risks when following this route.
Statseeker is a fully supported product, with a proactive, friendly team available 24/7 to help make our customers’ work life easier!
Open source solutions are often developer-led solutions, whereas the Statseeker team regularly engages with customers to understand what they need from the product. We use customer feedback to shape our future product development.
What trends are you seeing in NPM, and how is Statseeker adapting to those trends? We’re always looking to enhance Statseeker to reflect broader landscape technology trends.
Large enterprises are deploying an increasing number of IoT devices to serve their customers. Our focus here is to help them understand how these business critical IoT devices are performing. Is the device up/down? Is the IoT device working at the level that the customer is paying for? Is it reliable? Unlimited near real-time access to this data helps our customers to make operational decisions around IoT asset use.
Moving to the cloud has become a strategic direction for many organizations. Statseeker gives customers a choice of deployment: on premise or in a cloud environment such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud. The recently launched Statseeker remote polling feature enables customers to monitor their cloud infrastructure.
We’re seeing an increasing demand for edge monitoring. Organizations with multi-site remote networks want to know what’s happening in those edge environments. We’re helping customers improve their visibility of remote network locations and stream the data back to Statseeker, to alert, threshold, and report on unusual network behavior from a central point.
Statseeker has moved beyond traditional SNMP monitoring. We’ve partnered with Cisco to build API integrations with both Cisco Meraki and Cisco ACI infrastructure. This means our customers can now examine their entire network environment through Statseeker dashboards.
Year-on-year there are more applications, more users and more data traversing corporate networks, so it’s not surprising that the demand for reliable data collection at scale is also increasing. Data collection, storage, and retrieval of that data in the form of automated reports, reports on demand or through dashboards – whether that’s a customized or an out-of-the-box format – is exactly what Statseeker does better than other NPM products. Statseeker is a reliable choice for medium to large enterprises needing this functionality.
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