Proactive Insights: How to Go from Reacting to Preventing Network Issues

If you’re an IT or network operations leader, consider the following questions:

• How many surprises, if not outages or performance slowdowns, have your teams dealt with in the past week?
• How many customer and employee complaints have had to be escalated due to poor network experience?
• When the network went down, how many orders were abandoned, invoices deemed undelivered, credit cards left unprocessed, and apologies made?

Network operators know how frustrating it can be to constantly contend with pressing network issues and outages. These team members spend copious amounts of time putting out fires, rather than focusing on efforts like making plans to optimize the network. These teams have to deal with high volumes of false alarms as well real incidents that affect network performance and availability and the user experience. Many of these individuals get entangled with ensuring that vendors are meeting their service level agreements (SLAs), and that their organizations are actually getting the services they are paying for.

This reactive approach to network monitoring is not only stressful, but also costly and inefficient. This prevents you from aligning your network strategy with your business goals, and from delivering the best possible network experience to your customers and users. It also exposes the organization to business operations risks, compliance issues, and reputational damage.

So how can IT teams go from reactive to proactive network management? How can these teams gain complete visibility over their internal networks and even those third-party networks that are beyond their control? How do they get the insights they need to detect, address or even predict network issues—before they affect the business?

The answer is to adopt a modern network observability and management solution that can help teams achieve three key objectives:

• Establishing 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. Teams need to know what is normal and abnormal for the network, so that they can detect anomalies and deviations quickly and accurately. By using baseline and threshold functions on different network metrics, such as bandwidth, latency, throughput, errors, availability, and utilization; teams can define the expected behavior and patterns of the network and get alerts when something goes wrong.
• Planning. By the time teams know about a problem, critical time has passed, and user experience levels have been negatively affected. This is typical of a reactive approach to network management. To manage their environments effectively, network operations teams should take a proactive approach, keeping an eye on network performance and detecting any potential issues before they affect end users. These teams need to understand how network usage and performance are changing over time, so that they can anticipate future needs and demands. 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.
• Validating 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, and that the organization is getting the best value for the money. By using SLA monitoring and reporting functions, teams can measure the performance and availability of the vendors' services against key metrics such as latency, packet loss, jitter, uptime, and more, while holding them accountable for any breaches or violations. Proactive insights can enable network operations teams to identify and resolve potential issues before they have any impact on service quality. In the process, they can eliminate or reduce service interruptions, poor end-user experiences, and SLA breaches.

By achieving these objectives, you can transform your network operations, moving from reactive to proactive approaches. With these capabilities, you can improve your network reliability, performance, and resilience. You can also enhance your user experience, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes.

Large US commercial bank gets ahead of emerging capacity needs

A financial services company’s network operations team faced challenges due to network capacity growth. High demand from customers and employees, reliance on digital services, and the need to demonstrate control during audits were key issues. However, they lacked a complete view of network capacity consumption. By using NetOps by Broadcom, they identified overused and underused network components through relevant KPIs, which helped them meet audit standards and improve planning.

The Broadcom solution enables the network operations team to set up capacity baselines and thresholds and identify errors or discards in network devices, such as interfaces and routers. In a portal view, the solution displays the devices with the most abnormal utilization rates. For instance, the team used dashboards that showed the KPIs relevant to capacity planning for a specific time period. Examples of the KPIs used include:

• Interface Utilization In: Average, 90th Percentile, 95th Percentile, Max
• Interface Utilization Out: Average, 90th Percentile, 95th Percentile, Max

In this example, the solution provides insights that help the team determine when network devices reach critical utilization thresholds. With the solution, they can plan for future capacity needs based on historical, real-time, and trending data.

Why Broadcom

Network monitoring can be challenging and costly, especially when teams are contending with multiple tools, blind spots, and a lack of control. Broadcom offers a highly scalable, comprehensive solution that can help you overcome these challenges. Broadcom can help you manage your network with a flexible and comprehensive solution that works with any vendor, technology, and protocol. NetOps by Broadcom can collect and analyze different network metrics, such as utilization, throughput, latency, jitter, packet loss, errors, congestion, quality of service, and end-user experience.

The solution offers comprehensive visibility and deployment flexibility, enabling data gathering from across your environment, from an on-premises site to the cloud. This end-to-end visibility can help you improve network performance and efficiency and enable you to detect and fix any problems quickly and accurately..

With the Broadcom solution, you can gain unified visibility across all the environments your business services rely upon, including your internally managed networks and those operated by third parties. With these solutions, you can reduce operational and software costs, minimize downtime, improve service quality, and enhance the user experience.

To learn more about how to move from reactive to proactive network monitoring, download the white paper, Proactive Insights: How to Gain the Intelligence You Need to Address Issues—Before They Have an Impact, today.