Introduction: The Criticality of Network Performance
Regardless of an organization’s industry or size, virtually every critical business activity or service is at least partly reliant upon network connectivity. When network performance slows or issues arise that halt critical end-user services, it can be very costly to an organization. Lost employee productivity, eroded customer loyalty, and reduced sales can all be among the ramifications for even relatively brief service interruptions. Analysis from the Uptime Institute found that, for more than 60% of outages, total costs exceeded $100,000.
Challenge: It’s Getting Increasingly Difficult to Understand Network Performance—Let Alone Optimize It
For the network operations (NetOps) teams responsible for ensuring network availability, the task isn’t just more critical, it’s also more difficult.
Virtually every critical business service is now reliant upon a network that keeps getting more complex and dynamic. Organizations continue to grow increasingly reliant upon cloud services and emerging technologies like SD-WAN. NetOps teams also have had to adapt to the hybrid work requirements of employees. Given these trends, network services are reliant upon network infrastructures that are managed by employees, ISPs, cloud providers, and so on. Consequently, NetOps teams find themselves responsible for service availability, while relying upon networking services that are completely out of their control.
Exacerbating these challenges is the fact that many NetOps teams continue to rely upon legacy tools and technologies for network performance management. These tools were built for networking environments of prior decades—not for the multi-vendor, software-defined networks of today. Consequently, these teams contend with major blind spots.
While they can track how specific elements in their environment are performing, they’re not able to gain visibility into what matters most: the user experience. These teams fundamentally lack visibility into what’s happening with third-party networks, and how they may be affecting performance.
It used to be that teams could largely focus on monitoring performance of the networks they managed directly. That’s not enough now.
The New Network Performance Management Requirements: Active and Passive Monitoring
To contend with the realities posed by today’s modern networks, teams need a mix of the following capabilities:
Passive monitoring
Passive monitoring is essential in helping teams track what’s happening on the network and identifying issues when they arise. Through passive monitoring, teams can collect data from SNMP, user traffic, and so on, and then aggregate and analyze this data to identify issues.
The problem is that most passive monitoring solutions require that teams can access the devices that need to be monitored. Within legacy, on-premises networks of the past, this model worked fine. However, within today’s networking environments, this represents a significant limitation. At any given moment, users are reliant upon a complex mix of networks, including many that are completely outside of the internal NetOps team’s control.
Active monitoring
Given the limited visibility offered by passive monitoring, active monitoring has emerged as a critical complementary capability. Through active monitoring, teams can continually test network connections and emulate user behavior. These capabilities enable teams to gain end-to-end visibility across complex application delivery paths. Whether user connections are reliant upon home Wi-Fi, third-party ISP, SD-WAN, or cloud networks, NetOps teams can gain complete, hop-by-hop views.
The Solution: Managing Network Performance with AppNeta
AppNeta delivers a four-dimensional approach to network performance management, combining data on network paths, network packets, network flows, and web applications. The solution combines active and passive techniques to deliver a comprehensive picture.
AppNeta delivers these key capabilities:
- Actively test network delivery from end-users’ perspectives, no matter where they are, which network they are using, or which apps they access.
- Monitor every step of user interactions, even across high-scale and multi-vendor networks.
- Assess performance and spot issues across traditional data centers, private clouds, multi-vendor SD-WAN environments, and multiple cloud providers.
By leveraging AppNeta, teams can gain comprehensive visibility and actionable insights. When performance issues arise, teams can quickly identify the cause’s location, and take steps to remediate or provide workarounds. Fundamentally, by gaining a complete, consistently current picture of the performance end users are experiencing, the solution provides the vital insights teams need to track, manage, and optimize network performance.
Conclusion
NetOps teams can’t leave network availability to chance. Downtime is simply too costly. Today, these teams need to leverage advanced network performance management solutions that deliver comprehensive visibility across the entire network ecosystem that business services now rely upon. In short, these teams need AppNeta. With AppNeta, NetOps teams can harness the combined active and passive monitoring capabilities they need, so they can more intelligently track, manage, and optimize service levels. To learn more about this leading network performance management solution, be sure to visit the AppNeta page.
