Infrastructure Awareness
Check the existing network health

Studying the performance of the existing network provides a baseline measurement from which to measure the performance of the new network . Measurements of the present network can be used to show the customer how much better the new network performs after the design has been implemented. Any existing problems should also be documented. If the customer tries to blame these problems on the new installation, the documentation will be helpful.

Since the performance of existing network segments will affect overall performance, it is important to study the performance of the existing segments to determine how to meet the overall network performance goals. If a network is too large to study all segments, then analyze the segments that will interoperate the most with the new network design. Pay particular attention to backbone networks and networks that connect old and new areas.

In some cases, the goals of a customer might conflict with improving network performance. For example, the customer might want to reduce costs and not be concerned about network performance. In this case, the documentation of the original performance will prove that the network was not optimized to begin with, for cost reasons, and the new design has not made the performance worse.

The analysis of an existing network can be used to identify legacy systems that must be incorporated into a new design. Sometimes customers are not aware of the fact that older protocols are still running on their networks. By capturing network traffic with a protocol analyzer as part of the baseline analysis, the protocols running on the network can be identified without having to rely on the knowledge of the customer.