By Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India and SAARC, NETSCOUT
Today’s evolving business models are powered by highly complex IT infrastructure with several components and interdependencies. These network components perform individually and collectively determining the productivity of the workforce and the effectiveness of the business.
Furthermore, new challenges arise with the addition of third-party, SaaS applications to the existing technology mix. With such increasing in complexity of the infrastructure, pinning down problems and addressing them can get more challenging.
Importance of network performance
Network disruption of any kind can be counterproductive to any organization impacting its business outcomes. A decrease in productivity and revenues with unfavorable customer experience can lead to losing the competitive edge once enjoyed by the organization. It is here network performance management can deliver end-to-end visibility providing
actionable insights. This awareness enables the IT teams to proactively resolve network-based performance issues while ensuring digital assets perform consistently and accurately.
Moreover, optimal working of the network determines end-user experience.
Effective Network Performance Management (NPM)
It is critical to establish good NPM practices which drive IT efforts to mitigate performance issues. The first step in effective NPM is to monitor the network and all applications to gather performance metrics. The monitoring tools can look for packet loss, conduct network traffic analysis, uncover network node outages and measure bandwidth usage. An effective monitoring tool logs all performance issues including the circumstances under which the incident(s) occurred. The right NPM solution will analyze the data to provide a comprehensive view of all layers of the network, offering insights into performance problems.
Organizations should implement an NPM solution that can uncover malware, identify unsecured network devices and reveal other network vulnerabilities. IT security teams can put protocols in place to mitigate risks to avoid customer churn and brand damage. Close loop automation can be employed to add efficiencies and improve network performance.
Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) can be deployed to connect different components or up and downstream communication as well as data analysis. This can drive process efficiency. Sharing data from both network application performance management (APM) and NPM can provide a holistic view for quicker troubleshooting and enhanced visibility.
Increase in the adoption of NPM tools
Enterprise Management Associates’ latest biannual “Network Management Megatrends” report revealed nearly 53 percent of respondents are investing in NPM tool upgrades and enhancements. This demand for NPM tools is attributed to the increase in digital transformations involving software-defined networking (SDN), cloud migrations, co-location additions, and the adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) applications, revealing gaps in performance management visibility.
New tools and technologies also mean new transition points, or domains, for application communications. Problems can occur at any point, with traffic flowing between client edges in homes or remote offices to the internet and wide area network edges – (WAN) circuits, application servers in data centers, Co-Los, or public cloud edges.
Troubleshooting issues can now involve multiple vendors and service providers, making service edge monitoring and problem identification more challenging than before. The further increased complexity of the networked application environment and the task of troubleshooting end-user problems also has become more challenging.
Consolidation of NPM tools in the key
As IT organizations are constantly adding more tools to their network and application performance management arsenal, this has led to tool sprawl. This in turn has given rise to overlaps, gaps, vendor-specific solutions, and fractured data, resulting in negative outcomes even as organizations struggle to resolve performance-related issues. Delays are caused as a result.
The silo-specific network and application performance management to tools have become obsolete due to vendor consolidations or provider end-of-life decisions. They cannot be upgraded or expanded to support their organizations’ digital transformations without a forklift upgrade.
As enterprises face one or more of the challenges discussed here, developing a solidified network and application performance management strategy can be the key to a smoother digital transformation.