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Key Takeaways
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In my conversations about managing large, complex networks, one topic is now constant. The issue isn't budgets or new technology; it's about personnel. Specifically, it's the increasing difficulty of finding and retaining skilled professionals.
If you are feeling this pressure, you are not alone. The search for technical talent is a universal challenge. The "skills gap" is a persistent reality in our industry, with demand for expertise in networking, cloud, and security significantly outpacing the available supply of qualified candidates.
It’s easy to conclude that the only answer is more aggressive recruiting to find those rare experts who have experience with every system. But what if this focus is misplaced? What if the skills gap is not the root cause, but a consequence of a more fundamental issue in how we manage our networks?
Take a moment to consider how your network management strategy has evolved. As your organization adopted new technologies—moving to the cloud, deploying SD-WAN, using more SaaS applications—you likely added a new monitoring tool for each specific use case. It seemed like a practical decision at the time.
The result, however, is operational complexity. Instead of a single source of information, you now have multiple, conflicting data sets. Research shows that most network operations teams use between four and ten different monitoring tools. This arrangement is inefficient and creates functional barriers for your team.
When a performance problem arises, different groups look at their own specific tools and arrive at different conclusions. Each is correct within the limited view of their own domain, but no one has a complete picture of the end-to-end service path.
This environment directly exacerbates the skills gap. You are no longer looking for a network engineer; you are looking for an expert who has mastered numerous different types of technologies. This high requirement places a heavy burden on your senior staff and makes it incredibly difficult for new personnel to become effective.
To resolve this, you need to change your approach from siloed monitoring to network observability. The difference is significant. Monitoring confirms if individual devices are functional. Observability explains why a user's experience has degraded by analyzing the full path from the user's device, through all intermediary networks, to the application itself.
The goal is to be able to ask any question about your network’s performance and quickly receive a clear, accurate answer. Observability achieves this by collecting all relevant data—including faults, metrics, flows, logs, and user experience—from your entire hybrid network and correlating it into a single, unified view. This process turns large volumes of disconnected data points into actionable intelligence.
This is how you begin to solve the skills gap problem. When you provide your team with a platform that delivers genuine network observability, you are fundamentally changing their job and enabling them to succeed.
Network observability solutions can automate the initial, time-consuming diagnostic work that previously occupied your most experienced engineers. By correlating events and reducing irrelevant alerts, these solutions allow your team to focus on genuine issues that require attention. A less experienced team member is no longer overwhelmed by multiple dashboards. They can see the entire end-to-end network path on a single screen, understand dependencies, and quickly isolate whether an issue is in the corporate network, the internet, or the cloud provider’s domain.
This doesn't make your senior experts obsolete; it makes them strategic. It frees them from constant, reactive problem-solving so they can focus on optimizing the network and planning for the future. It dramatically shortens the onboarding time for new hires, allowing them to contribute meaningfully much sooner. You're not just making your network more transparent; you're creating a more capable and efficient team.
The difficulty in hiring network experts is a real business challenge, but you cannot solve it by trying to hire faster than the technology changes. The more effective path is to change your operational strategy. By moving from a collection of disconnected tools to a unified observability platform, you can empower the talented people you already have. This makes your entire operation more resilient and intelligent, and better prepared for future challenges.
Find out how you can empower the experts you already have. Explore how modern network performance monitoring can provide the clarity and actionable intelligence your team needs to succeed.