By Lee Walker, CTO, Entuity
A confluence of changes in application deployment and business operations necessitates managers tonow manage application and service performance beyond the edge of their own network.
Applications and services continue to move beyond local installations and into cloud-hosted environments. In fact Gartner anticipates that SaaS solutions will generate revenue close to $120 billion in 2021, a number that will grow to $141 billion by 2022. For already overburdened network managers, this means the majority of services upon which a business relies are now beyond the traditional reach of their business network monitoring and troubleshooting abilities.
In addition, a remote or hybrid workforce is likely to be in place for the foreseeable future given the protracted pandemic environment and so for the workforce to remain productive, IT staff must ensure that on-premises applications are working well and can be easily accessed from outside the corporate network.
These changes mean an end-to-end network management service that offers a comprehensive view into your network performance has become more than a nice to have – it’s a necessity of the new normal of business in the digital era.
Let’s look at several of the most critical benefits a secure network monitoring service can enable.
Cloud Application Monitoring
As workers access applications that are migrated out to the cloud, they must be monitored for optimum performance. An effective monitoring system equips IT teams to understand how applications are operating.
For example, some workers might be experiencing difficulties in accessing Office365, but you’re unsure if the issue lies within your network or beyond. It’s essential that you discover where the problem lies so that you can pursue the appropriate method of troubleshooting or request the ISP provide a fix if the issue is beyond your firewall.
A real time network path discovery tool can maximize the plethora of data that itself and your network devices are collecting by illustrating, monitoring, and alerting on where an application’s traffic is traveling over both private and public networks out to the cloud . With this type of deep insight into the network components, IT teams gain visibility into cloud /SaaS services to identify, analyze and resolve issues quickly, prioritize vital applications and receive real-time alerts on their behavioral anomalies and understand where excessive latency is impacting performance.
Consistent, Secure Network Access
Throughout the crisis, VPNs have become a much more prominent actor in the network, providing secure access to company networks for millions of home workers. As a result, IT teams have had to ensure remote workers can access company networks without issue. And because, hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of users at the same time are using VPN sessions to be able to access vital apps, IT teams need to be able to see where there are saturation points on devices, as such saturation impacts end-user ability to access their applications.
A network monitoring solution allows IT teams to visualize VPN activity over time, both geographically, but also down to individual device level for troubleshooting. Teams can see how activity fluctuates during business hours and encourages proactivity in preventing saturation. They can also correlate the number of VPN sessions with application performance (such as response time) and outbound/inbound traffic on certain interfaces. If circuit saturation and application degradation correspond with the rising number of VPN sessions, the team can start planning for optimizing capacity.
Collectively, this information allows IT to fully understand the status of activity on a device, providing a way to proactively monitor where more VPN tunnels are needed to accommodate users, to see where the network may be getting saturated, and the trends in use that the team can adapt resources to accommodate.
Optimal On-premises Application Performance
With fewer people on site, it’s easy to lose track of what might be happening in your building. But in reality,extra attention should be paid to the environmental conditions of server rooms, QA labs and data centers. For example, a server room (with servers hosting many important on-premises applications) could be susceptible to a cooling failure. With a monitoring solution, IT teams can be proactive by monitoring key servers, setting thresholds for CPU, temperature, fans and application response time.
Increasingly, users demand top notch performance from applications. In fact, Google found that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within three seconds. As a result, without network performance monitoring, the first warning signs of sluggish operations may be your users reporting slow or unresponsive applications. The last thing any business wants is for users to bean early warning system for a potentially catastrophic and costly failure. Network monitoring and analytics give your IT team time to remediate any issues before they turn into revenue-impacting downtime.
Analytics tools can also assist with monitoring apps from outside the network. By deploying an analytics agent in a public cloud, or in an office remote from the host site, you can monitor reachability, availability and performance from the perspective of someone outside the network.
The global pandemic has reshaped everyone’s approach to business, and IT operations has been no exception. Even as the world shifts to the new normal many of the new features of the working and technology world will remain. So, whether you are gearing up to expand your business or simply providing the best end user experience to each employee, a strong network monitoring capability is critical in maximizing network operations.