How MSPs Can Maximize Network Observability: 3 Keys to Success

In today’s increasingly dynamic digital world, the need for end-to-end network visibility has never been more critical. These requirements are especially profound for managed service providers (MSPs) and communications service providers (CSPs). MSPs and CSPs find themselves at the epicenter of digital transformation. These organizations must constantly meet rigorous service level agreements (SLAs), while transforming their own operations and meeting growing customer demands for innovative and high-quality cloud-based services. The migration of workloads to the cloud introduces a complex set of challenges, as customers’ network delivery paths now span internal data centers, MSP environments, and a plethora of third-party entities, including cloud providers, ISPs, and SaaS vendors.

The lack of comprehensive visibility across these multifaceted network delivery paths can lead to significant performance degradation and lengthy outages—and these issues continue to grow ever-more costly. For example, one report found that for the largest organizations, downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute, and a day-long outage could result in losses of a staggering $1.4 billion. Further, continued gaps in visibility can ultimately result in customer dissatisfaction and potentially lead to customer churn—a scenario that every service provider aims to prevent.

For MSPs to combat these challenges, IT operations and service delivery teams must adopt a solution that offers complete visibility into the health, performance, and availability of all network devices and services that customers’ connected experiences depend upon.

Such a solution should encompass not only internally owned networks and customer environments but also extend to the intricate delivery paths of today’s modern environments, including third-party, multi-cloud, and multi-vendor networks. Application-level insights are of paramount importance, reflecting the actual network experience delivered to customers. With this comprehensive visibility, teams can significantly reduce mean time to innocence (MTTI), effectively sidestepping the counterproductive blame game that can ensue among customers, service providers, cloud providers, and other stakeholders when issues arise.

Requirements for managed service providers

To contend with proliferating technologies and increasing complexity, while ensuring optimized service levels, your teams must take a more unified approach, one that encompasses cloud networks and SaaS applications. Here are three requirements that bubble to the top:

• End-to-end visibility. Teams must gain visibility into the entire network delivery path between users, managed infrastructure, cloud environments, and business-critical applications. This visibility needs to extend into the user’s experience, regardless of where users may be located or which applications they’re accessing.
• Unified, scalable platforms. It is vital for your teams to reduce their reliance on disparate tools and establish a single console that can provide a unified view of multi-vendor, multi-technology environments. This is key to not only accessing actionable, correlated intelligence but making significant gains in operational efficiency. This unified platform needs to be open, capable of supporting technologies from a wide range of vendors. This platform must scale effectively to handle business growth and be resilient in the face of disruptions. Security is also crucial, so the platform must be hardened. Additionally, it should be flexible enough to keep up with the accelerating pace of cloud and AI adoption.
• Ease of operations. Operating a multi-vendor network can be quite challenging for your network operations teams. However, having a dashboard that provides a single-pane-of-glass view that spans across service provider and customer networks can alleviate these obstacles. To capitalize on this potential, teams need network tools that are extensible enough to accommodate emerging technologies and services, including new cloud offerings. Specifically, your teams need capabilities for quickly identifying root causes of network issues, proactively detecting issues before they affect customers, and effectively employing automation to streamline network operations.

What’s needed is a robust network observability solution that not only enhances network operations—but helps teams meet strategic imperatives for boosting customer retention and revenue growth. When MSPs are empowered with the tools to proactively monitor and manage the entire network delivery path, they can ensure optimal performance, preempt potential issues, and deliver a customer experience that not only meets but exceeds expectations. In doing so, service providers can solidify their market position, foster customer loyalty, and navigate the complexities of the cloud era with confidence and finesse.

How Broadcom is helping MSPs and CSPs

Network Observability by Broadcom enables service provider teams to gain complete visibility, from the customer site to the cloud. With this solution, your teams can use a single, unified portal that offers visibility of inventory, topology, device metrics, logs, configurations, faults, flows, and user experience metrics. The solution converts all this intelligence into actionable insights—enabling your teams to track issues, analyze trends, and efficiently isolate and resolve the network delivery issues that degrade user experiences.

Multi-tenant, resilient and scalable network observability solution, addressing real MSP use cases.

Here are a couple examples of how customers are realizing real returns on their investments in Network Observability by Broadcom:

Fujitsu Central Europe

By leveraging Network Observability by Broadcom, Fujitsu Central Europe was able to increase operational efficiencies by improving monitoring processes, monitoring scale, and network configuration management practices. 
The team saw a 70% reduction in alarm noise, and now typically receives just five to 10 alarms a week. Further, they’ve gained the insights needed to retire redundant toolsets. As a result, their network operations center has realized a 75% reduction in total cost of ownership for their network operations center (NOC).

Altice

For business customers, Altice offers various tiers of monitoring services, ranging from basic up/down system monitoring to higher level tiers that provide more advanced performance and service level monitoring. Broadcom solutions are instrumental in delivering these valued services.

With Network Observability by Broadcom, the team at Altice has been able to adapt seamlessly to new technologies and the demands of new networks. The solution enables the team to correlate individual device performance with end-to-end network monitoring, across both internal environments and externally managed networks. As a result, they can quickly pinpoint the location and root cause of issues, speeding MTTI. Further, the solution’s active network testing enables Altice to validate every hop in the network path of new service offerings, from client to application. As a result, they can spot and address any issues that would have a negative impact on the user experience, all before rolling new offerings into production.

View our solution brief to learn more about the key capabilities and benefits MSPs and CSPs can gain by using Network Observability by Broadcom.