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Network Performance Management

Corvil Enterprise: Network Performance Management and Analytics

Pico's Corvil Enterprise transforms raw IP network data into streaming operational intelligence for business operations, network engineering, application operations, and client support teams — serving six distinct user groups from a single unified platform.

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Overview

Pico's Corvil Enterprise is a network performance management and analytics platform that takes network data from IP infrastructure and transforms it into streaming operational intelligence for business and IT operations teams. Corvil's microvisibility approach automatically discovers the protocols, applications, sessions, and users active on IP networks — then decodes packet payloads to understand not just network performance, but the application performance actually experienced by end users. This unified approach on a single platform serves six distinct user groups simultaneously: business operations, network engineering, network operations, application operations, application development, and client support.

The Challenge

Modern digital businesses depend on networks that span data centers, WANs, cloud environments, and L2/L3 service providers — yet most monitoring tools provide only coarse, header-level visibility that misses what is actually happening inside those networks. Traditional monitoring tools cannot look beyond network headers and ignore the rich operational detail carried in packet payloads, leaving teams blind to the application-layer causes of performance issues. Without a unified view of network and application performance together, mean time to resolution stretches and business impact accumulates before root cause is identified.

Key Capabilities

Microvisibility and Unified Packet Analysis

Corvil's microvisibility provides a deep understanding of application performance through each layer of IT infrastructure. Hundreds of analytics plug-ins auto-discover, decode, reconstruct, and analyze network data in real time — supporting VoIP, web applications, databases, storage systems, BGP routing, and more. Unique Deep Data Buffering allows deployments to be sized for average traffic rates rather than 1-second peaks.

Network Operations Intelligence

Corvil measures end-to-end latency and loss of application traffic across the network with precision not achievable by flow-based tools, providing congestion analytics and bandwidth sizing. It validates SLAs against service providers, analyzes BGP routing in real time, and benchmarks the performance of firewalls, load balancers, and WAN acceleration technologies.

Application Performance and Business Transaction Monitoring

Corvil decodes packet payloads to understand the application performance delivered by servers and experienced by end users across web applications, databases, storage, and VoIP. Corvil Search automatically indexes billions of transaction IDs, customer names, and application data. Corvil Streams export key events in real time to Splunk, Hadoop, kdb+, MongoDB, Tableau, and ElasticSearch.

Use Cases

  • Network operations teams use Corvil's end-to-end latency measurement to hold service providers accountable for contracted SLA performance across WAN circuits and L2/L3 provider links.
  • Application operations teams correlate VoIP call quality degradation with the competing application traffic causing it — a root cause that dedicated VoIP tools are blind to.
  • Business operations teams use Corvil Dashboards and Corvil Lens to track real-time KPIs and user experience metrics for web-delivered business applications, including backend database and storage system performance.
  • Network engineering teams use Corvil's TCP analysis to benchmark infrastructure changes and validate QoS policy design before production deployment.
  • Application development teams identify performance bottlenecks and get immediate feedback on the effect of optimizations in both development and production environments using live packet-derived analytics.

Solution Highlights

  • Hundreds of auto-discovery analytics plug-ins ship with the Corvil appliance and are updated monthly, covering VoIP, video, web applications, databases, storage, email, middleware, and network protocols.
  • Unique Deep Data Buffering sizes deployments for average traffic rates rather than the 1-second peaks that can be 10x the average, reducing hardware costs without sacrificing capture completeness.
  • Corvil Streams provide real-time export of analytics events to Splunk, Hadoop, kdb+, MongoDB, Tableau, and ElasticSearch via an open, flexible API.
  • The Corvil SDK allows organizations to decode proprietary applications and protocols and define custom real-time business analytics beyond the out-of-box capability.
  • Appliance range spans from 4x1Gbps through to 2x40Gbps fiber with 96TB storage for high-density data center deployments.

What You Achieve

Operations teams achieve faster mean time to resolution by correlating network and application performance together in a single platform, eliminating the handoffs and blame cycles between network and application teams.

Network engineering teams can correctly size bandwidth and validate QoS policy decisions using actual traffic behavior data rather than estimates, reducing over-provisioning costs.

Client support teams transform raw performance data into business metrics and KPIs for real-time internal and external reporting, improving customer-facing service accountability.

Ready to see it in action?

Talk to a Pico specialist about your environment and how Corvil Enterprise: Network Performance Management and Analytics fits your needs.

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