Experience-Driven NetOps: What It Is and Why It Matters

Recent events have changed the world forever. For network operations (NetOps) teams, it means there’s no going back to the way things used to be. Virtually overnight, teams had to adapt to work-from-anywhere (WFA) models. The move to SaaS, cloud, and SD-WAN continue to accelerate—and in the process fundamentally alter the nature of network environments. That’s why it’s time to evolve traditional network monitoring practices and embrace new approaches like Experience-Driven NetOps. Through this approach, teams can realize end-to-end connectivity and performance validation from the end-user point of view.

Compared to six years ago, NetOps teams are finding it nearly twice as difficult to succeed. That trend is highlighted by the 2022 EMA Network Management Megatrends study, which found that the percentage of NetOps teams that are successful has declined, from 49% in 2016 to 27% in 2022.

The question then becomes, “why the dramatic plunge?” The network operations center’s (NOC) overreliance on traditional NetOps tools is at least partly responsible. For many years, legacy NetOps tools have been used along with standardized operational workflows for triaging network issues. These workflows have been supported by well-defined processes for managing alarms, events, faults, flows, and logs. NetOps teams use these tools to troubleshoot issues, quickly find root cause, escalate incidents, open tickets, or isolate and resolve problems.

But the world is changing. Transformation is happening everywhere, with cloud and SaaS adoption now in full throttle. Work is being done from anywhere, with demands for resources coming from everywhere and at any time. NetOps teams now fully recognize that public cloud, SaaS applications, and cloud-native application architectures are critical drivers of their network management approaches—toppling conventional operational monitoring strategies. After all, traditional toolsets are viewed as bloated, inefficient, and disconnected. They contribute to manual errors that degrade the network and they produce too many false alerts.

However, while cloud, SaaS, and WFA adoption help the business achieve gains in revenue generation, cost reduction, and productivity improvement, they can create massive heartburn for NetOps teams. Now, these teams must deal with the lack of visibility beyond the four walls of their data center, and the associated risks these blind spots pose to the organization. It is therefore critical for NetOps teams to find an effective way to route user-experience metrics through traditional, standardized operational workflows, so they can reduce the risk of outages and degradation.

To illustrate this scenario, how often do you think end users escalate service issues before the NetOps team is aware of those problems? According to the EMA report referenced above, that’s 31% of the time on average. Now, imagine how quickly that degraded customer experience can lead to lost productivity, diminished satisfaction, and damage to the brand.

Conversely, when end-user experience metrics are integrated into your standard triage procedures, you can more effectively ensure reliable network delivery along with an exceptional user experience. If you are wondering how to meet these objectives, consider the move to Experience-Driven NetOps.

Experience-Driven NetOps

Experience-Driven NetOps is a modern networking approach that delivers unified, end-to-end network visibility. With this approach, you can understand, manage, and optimize the performance of digital services, regardless of the network they may be running on. The approach extends monitoring into edge services, multi-cloud and SaaS, home wireless, and last-mile ISP networks. As a result, your teams can see every communication path and degradation point for the entire end-user experience delivery chain.

Experience-Driven NetOps provides a modern solution to address the gaps in today’s legacy network management tools by optimizing standard workflows with end-user experience data. The result? Complete, unified monitoring that fuels the success of your cloud transformation, makes your IT more efficient, enhances the experience of your end users, and delivers comprehensive visibility into work-from-anywhere environments. 

Learn more about how Experience-Driven NetOps can help you overcome the challenges of the new network in this white paper. Read now and discover how your organization can evolve its monitoring strategy and take full advantage of next-generation network technologies.