Optimize Your Infrastructure Resources for Continuity of Network Monitoring Operations

Leverage DX NetOps network monitoring software metric projections to manage demands for IT resources proactively and cost-effectively.

Capacity is a finite resource, so your IT Team needs to carefully analyze current and future use case scenarios to prevent potential bottlenecks. Presenting key network metric projections in a simple and unified manner is paramount to predict capacity and to understand when more resources are needed, allowing you to plan accordingly.

This practitioner blog will help you to tailor operations experience for line-of-business owners or network capacity planners. You can create a NetOps dashboard that will show projected metrics for network path capacity utilization, all integrated through AppNeta digital experience monitoring by Broadcom Software.

Even though we are showcasing the “capacity utilization” metric on this blog, remember that this operation can be done for any NetOps network monitoring software metric (CPU utilization, bandwidth, and others).

• As a first step, we are going to enable Metric Projections in NetOps.
  Go to the NetOps Portal, then Administration, then Monitored Items Management. Then, select “Metric Families” and search for the metric family “SDN Path.”
• Once the “SDN Path” metric family has been selected, on the right section (Metric tab), search for the Metric “Outbound capacity utilization percentage.”
• Edit the metric and enable the 95th percentile and define the three projections. This will create three new versions of the metric: 30-, 90- and 180-day projections. See image below:

NOTE: Each projection you calculate may affect system performance, so only calculate projections you really need.

• The final result should look like the image below:

• Remember to update the Metric Family by pressing the “Update Metric Family” button. The new data will be available for reporting within several polling cycles. This same operation can be also performed via API.

The next step will be to configure a quick view that will help you to understand where you have network delivery capacity issues. Proceed as follows:

• Create a New Dashboard, add a “IM Group Scorecard Trend” view and configure it as displayed below:
  NOTE: We are selecting a Time Rage of “Last 12 Months” in Custom Time Range so we will need to wait until Weekly Roll-ups are performed to see data in the Scorecard.

• The final result will be as the scorecard below:

This view will enable operators to look at their path utilization and understand potential capacity concerns in the future (specially for fixed rate circuits).

• If you prefer to consume these projections in a trend chart instead, just select the metrics for which we have enabled projections and enable the “Show” radio button in the “Projection” row as shown below.

• The result will display actual metric values with the overlay projection in the trend chart, and is valuable to understand if link capacity utilization is increasing or decreasing over time. This data is important to determine if you should invest in expanding infrastructure or if you can achieve cost reduction instead.

With these simple network monitoring software steps, you’ll enable your operations and planning team to proactively manage demands for network resources.

Think about the following use cases to determine how these NetOps projection dashboards can help your business:

• Do I need to embrace SD-WAN adoption to mitigate WAN capacity issues?
• How can I verify that the interface bandwidth is sufficient for a specific time in the future?
• Where can I cut costs without service interruptions?
• How can I ensure optimal performance and maximize resource utilization?

This set of NetOps network monitoring software views and projections will enable network operations to have the full picture of how metrics are evolving over time and assist capacity planners in the decision making process. It is a clear example of how NetOps can complement and enrich AppNeta key experience metrics by defining projections and percentiles to understand future usage in more detail.

For more, click here to learn about “Experience Driven NetOps.”