Listen to Your Network: Find Problems Before They Find You

Featured article by Michael Segal, director of solutions marketing, NetScout

Effective communication is crucial to a successful business relationship. But did you know this same principle should apply to IT professionals and the relationship with their networks? If you take the time, armed with the right tools, to proactively listen to your network, you would be surprised to find that many times the warning signs of underlying problems have been there all along. Your network can be quite the effective communicator when trying to tell you how well the entire service infrastructure is performing – from the applications and service enablers to the servers and database.

Unfortunately not all network and application performance management platforms are equally effective at listening to their network and tap into the wealth of operational intelligence which can be mined from traffic data inspection. To enable IT teams to actively listen to and efficiently troubleshoot performance issues before they impact the bottom line, look for platforms which support technologies that inspect traffic data continuously and in real-time, and can scale to analyze large volumes of data efficiently at high velocity. It should also offer comprehensive service triage workflows to enable quickly and efficiently detect the root cause of service degradations based on end-to-end visibility across physical, virtual and hybrid environments.

Together, a performance management platform with real-time and continuous traffic data monitoring technology can provide a holistic atomic level view into network, application, server performance and user communities’ experience. This not only gives IT administrators the confidence to identify and rapidly triage revenue and customer impacting service delivery issues, but also offers other advantages to achieve increased service quality and operational excellence, such as:

– Solving tomorrow’s problems today: Your business and customers expect business services and systems to run around the clock; there is no off. Traditional network monitoring tools lack the capability to provide the real-time and actionable intelligence based on continuous monitoring and analysis of traffic data. Therefore a different approach is required to allow the IT teams need to get out ahead of the problems and solve them before the user experience and customer services are significantly impacted.

– Eliminates the “stab in the dark” process of trying to identify the source of the problem: Shift your service assurance paradigm from defensive to offensive triage to detect and resolve performance degradations before they become service outages. This will simplify IT operations while reducing costs and down time associated with identifying the root cause of a problem.

– Deliver’s deeper views into resource usage: use technology that can deliver traffic based intelligence for accurate insights into resource usage across your entire service delivery infrastructure. See which applications are using which links, when specific applications are active, and who is consuming these applications to help proactively organize and analyze traffic data so you have the confidence to make better informed capacity planning decisions.

– Eradicates the “unknown”: Traffic data is the singular source of truth in your enterprise. Being able to continuously monitor, organize and analyze traffic data in real time and having a holistic view puts truth in your hands. Executives don’t like unknowns. It’s more efficient to make better decisions when dealing with the facts on application and services performance as opposed to relying on theories.

Holistic and real-time visibility into the network, applications, servers and user communities and the relationships and interdependencies between them with the objective to analyze how they are performing based on continuous traffic data monitoring enables you to resolve issues before they become serious problems. By carefully watching over your service delivery infrastructure and proactively monitoring service degradations with a performance management platform, IT operations can dramatically eliminate the shortcoming of traditional silo-specific or point management tools which lack the holistic and real-time visibility and are therefore ineffective for service triage purposes. Using the a single service assurance platform with a holistic and real-time visibility can provide the insight into the performance of IT services and ensure operational excellence and positive user and customer experience.

As companies continue to rely on applications to perform its most critical business tasks, it’s more important than ever to listen to your network by performing deep analysis of the traffic data it carries and make the case to invest in a service assurance platform which offers these capabilities. For IT operational teams, there is no better way to enable comprehensive service assurance for complex, distributed IT services. Your CEO—and your users— will thank you.

Michael Segal is director of solutions marketing at NetScout and a seasoned product management professional with expertise in technical areas such as cloud, virtualization, security, IP networking, mobility, Wi-Fi / wireless, and VoIP / UC.