While it’s tempting to make fun of it, the reality is that Excel is a pretty good tool to consolidate the data from your network in one place, analyze it, generate reports, and much more. Unfortunately, importing data from network appliances into Excel is a laborious, manual process and keeping the data up-to-date is almost impossible.

Applications are an important part of your business strategy to drive great customer interactions. Often times, the P&L outcomes for lines of business are directly tied to the successful troubleshooting of application issues in a timely manner. Beyond configuring application services such as load balancing, IT pros find that they need to invest in a whole bunch of tools when servicing their internal customers' needs for application troubleshooting and performance data. These include tools to gain visibility into the end user experience for that application, network monitoring tools, aggregation taps, and application performance monitoring solutions. The painful task of piecing together data from such disparate point solutions takes several days if not weeks and does not present a reliable or repeatable process for IT and operations teams. On the other hand, the application owners are left waiting for data that they need quickly to debug issues.