In many enterprises, it seems IT and network operations teams are constantly being forced to react to problems, which leaves little time to make the meaningful optimizations that advance the organization’s objectives.

Those realities only grow more pronounced as the implications of today’s modern networks continue to make their presence known. User connections continue to rely on a network delivery path that features:

  • Increasingly dynamic, software-defined environments.
  • Increasingly diverse sets of technologies and vendors.
  • Increasingly dispersed cloud services and vendors.

All this growth in complexity and change continues to strain the demands of teams, especially those with finite capacity and budgets. (In other words, pretty much all teams.)

To meet the proliferating demands of these modern networks, it’s vital to establish optimized operations. Through this optimization, teams will be equipped to establish faster, more accurate triage and speed resolution, while reducing costs.  Following are the three key requirements for making this happen.

#1. Gain End-to-End Coverage

To keep their network-based services performing as needed, today’s IT and network operations teams need to gain actionable insights and end-to-end coverage of network data. They need to be able to monitor and manage multiple devices, technologies, and vendors, while contending with huge amounts of data and significant complexity. Without this end-to-end vantage point, teams run the risk of missing the warning signs that precede degradations and outages. How can teams get a clear and accurate picture of network performance and health?

What you need is a single network observability and management solution that can provide these capabilities:

  • Address the demands of multi-vendor, multi-technology environments. Leverage a single solution can offer coverage of different types of networks, including LAN, WAN, SD-WAN, cloud, wireless, and more. Establish a common data model and architecture to eliminate inconsistencies and simplify analysis across the multi-vendor technologies that make up the network.
  • Eliminate network monitoring blind spots. In spite of, and often because of, massive volumes of data, teams nevertheless contend with network visibility gaps. By correlating data from multiple sources, such as SNMP, NetFlow, IP SLA, synthetic tests, and more, and applying root cause analysis, advanced solutions enable teams to identify and troubleshoot issues faster and more effectively.
  • Establish unified visibility and control. It is vital to establish a single pane of glass for monitoring the network experience from the end-users’ perspective and the health, performance, and availability of all network devices and services. In this way, teams can control their network from a single interface, which simplifies their operations and reduces the likelihood of human error.

#2. Establish Rapid and Accurate Isolation

When network performance issues arise that have a negative impact on critical business services, teams need to be able to distinguish between symptoms and the actual root cause of issues—and do so quickly and accurately. To achieve these objectives, here are the capabilities network operations teams need:

  • A highly scalable, unified data model that combines all the disparate network data needed and makes it useful for investigation. This speeds data analysis and problem detection and enables significant improvements in mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) metrics.
  • Intelligent alarm suppression that helps teams cut through the noise of redundant and overlapping alerts, so they can focus on what matters and more rapidly resolve critical issues.
  • Advanced analytics that enable teams to go beyond proactive triage and establish predictive, automated operations.
  • Intelligent triage workflows that enable teams to go from viewing alarms to diagnosing the root cause of network issues—with a single mouse click.
  • Traffic analysis and anomaly detection that can help teams understand current patterns of network behavior and avoid potential future outages.
  • Network configuration management capabilities that help teams comply with policies and regulatory mandates, and avoid the misconfigurations that can cause widespread outages.

#3. Move to Proactive Management

Today, many network operators are contending with the frustrating, draining reality of constant fire-fighting. Instead of focusing on efforts like making plans to optimize the network, these team members spend significant amounts of their days putting out fires. This reactive approach to network monitoring is not only stressful, but also costly and inefficient.

So how can IT and network operations teams go from reactive to proactive network management? The answer is to adopt a modern network observability and management solution that can help teams achieve three key objectives:

  • Establish effective baselines. Too many siloed IT tools generating too many false positives can clutter the visibility of operators, making it hard to identify and resolve the real issues. To combat these challenges, network operations teams need to have a clear and comprehensive baseline understanding of network performance, health, and user experience at any given time. By establishing these baselines, teams can detect anomalies and deviations quickly and accurately.
  • Track trends to do intelligent planning. To manage their environments effectively, network operations teams need to keep an eye on network performance and detect any potential issues before they affect end users. By using trend analysis, capacity planning, and volatility tracking functions, network engineers and architects can see how the network is evolving, and make informed decisions about upgrades, expansions, or optimizations.
  • Harness data to objectively validate SLAs. One of the key tasks of network operations teams is to validate SLAs. Teams need to verify that vendors are delivering the services that they promised. By using SLA monitoring and reporting functions, teams can measure the performance and availability of the vendors’ services against key metrics and hold them accountable for any breaches or violations.

Conclusion

Network monitoring can be challenging and costly, especially when teams are contending with multiple tools, blind spots, and a lack of control. By achieving the objectives outlined above, you can transform your network operations. With these capabilities, you can improve your network reliability, performance, and resilience. You can also enhance your user experience, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes.

To learn more, be sure to visit our network observability and management page, which features links to an extensive assortment of white papers focused on optimizing network operations.

SECOND OF THREE PARTS

PART 1: 3 Steps to Accelerating your Network Transformations

PART 3: 3 Keys to Enhancing Connected Experiences in Modern Networks