What caused this network performance management project to come up for discussion? (What's the pain point?)
That's really the most important question -- the "why" of the project is ultimately what you want to understand. Clients can have many different reasons for looking at network performance. Some reasons may be general and vague, while other clients may point to specific requirements. For example, we've seen instances where a client is actually interested in finding out what their users are doing and controlling that kind of access to prohibit dating websites or shopping websites, etc. Their talk about network performance was a means of politely and diplomatically approaching the problem of productivity.
Return to the network performance management FAQ guide and read the rest of Dave's expert responses.