Keeping an eye on network performance is a chore that's never finished. To do it well, companies need to track a broad range of indicators and be able to discern potential trouble spots without getting lost in all the data. (Compare Application Performance Monitoring products)

Mazu Networks this week announced that it added new analytic capabilities to its Profiler software, which analyzes network behavior by tracking application performance, application availability, network utilization and certain security indicators. New features built into Mazu Profiler 8.2 include the ability to measure application availability based on the number of users; the option to weigh application performance based on response time and number of connections; and tools to gauge network utilization based on bandwidth usage overall and by application.

Key to the software is that it doesn’t depend on IT managers to manually set - and continually refine - thresholds for application performance. Setting manual thresholds on activity within complex IT infrastructures requires continuous tuning, which is impractical in today’s world, Mazu says. Mazu Profiler is designed to learn the typical behavior patterns for hundreds of key performance indicators, based on how users, applications, networks and systems interact and are dependent on each other.

Static indicators can waste IT administrators’ time, according to Debra Curtis, research vice president at Gartner.

“To improve the productivity of the network operations team, network performance management products should automatically establish a baseline measurement of ‘normal’ behavior for time of day and day of week, dynamically set warning and critical thresholds as standard deviations off the baseline, and notify the network manager only when an exception condition occurs,” Curtis said in a statement. “A simple static threshold based on an industry average or a ‘rule of thumb’ will generate false alarms and waste the network manager's time.”

Mazu Profiler 8.2 also includes new reporting features, such as the ability to right-click on summary information to see packet-level detail.

Mazu’s software starts at $35,000.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.