Xavier Chaparro, the senior network engineer at Air Methods—an air medical transport company that lifts more than 98,000 patients each year—faced a series of network management challenges during their network expansion that witnessed bandwidth requirement of more than what the company’s hardware could support. Rather than reinvesting in larger, costlier appliances, he decided to try out the Quality of Service (QoS) functionality that included in the company’s existent Cisco routers. Although Chaparro admits he could have managed the routers using the traditional command-line interface, he was convinced to spend dollars on a commercial software by the network management solution provider—LiveAction. “I primarily liked the way LiveAction’s LiveNX software provided visualization for QoS, so I could actually see how it shaped the traffic passing through each interface. LiveNX also simplified the process for creating and implementing policies, and it prevented errors.” Today, he uses the QoS functionality to classify his network traffic and applications, and is satisfied with the network’s ability to adapt in tandem with the company’s growth.
Initially developed for the US Department of Defense, LiveNX today has a satisfied client base that spans public as well as private sector enterprises across a variety of industries, including education, healthcare, retail, and hospitality. The solution is an application-aware network performance management and QoS control tool that has been developed through engineering partnerships with Cisco Systems. It features an innovative visual display, real-time big data analytics, and deep control of routers and switches for unparalleled network administration and offers a fast, simple, and cost-effective way to monitor and control application performance. LiveNX builds a highly interactive mental model of the network and maps devices to create a visualization of the entire network. Additionally, it provides added capabilities for capacity planning and performance baselining, application performance and troubleshooting, and cybersecurity.
The technology the company leverages replaces complicated error-prone command lines with an intuitive graphical user interface and integrates rich visualizations of the network topology.
LiveNX builds a highly interactive mental model of the network and maps devices to create a visualization of the entire network
The topology view shows how flows and routes traverse the network in real-time and highlights any source of congestion.
In order to give maximum value to customers by allowing prior testing of what they would pay for, LiveAction offers LiveNX for a test drive and a 14-day trial. While LiveNX Test Drive doesn’t require installation and can be accessed from LiveNX demo lab after a simple registration, the trial option requires installation and can be scaled up to cover a maximum of 10 devices.
The company employs highly correlated workflows to quickly resolve business critical performance issues in WAN, cloud applications, MPLS or DMVPN links, VoIP, surveillance cameras, and BYOD devices. LiveAction also provides visualization of PfR path changes across the network topology, Out-of-Policy reasons, triggering PfR route changes and the resulting application traffic associated with those PfR route changes.
Although LiveAction is a market leader, it strives to constantly innovate its capabilities in attempts to address evolving customer needs and challenges. Committing on this promise, the company rolled out the latest version of its software, the LiveNX 6.0. In addition to the new cloud-based licensing system that makes managing licenses easier, LiveNX builds new features such as multivendor SD-WAN support, site-to-site traffic analysis, and web UI reporting enhancements amongst others.
