Fighting to Break Free of the Never-ending War Room

The only thing worse than getting stuck in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam is getting trapped in an IT war room for hours, days, or even weeks trying to resolve enterprise network problems. In fact, customers using war rooms to troubleshoot their issues tell NETSCOUT it has taken from 15 hours to 6 weeks to resolve a network problem—while a 2019 report cited war rooms taking an average of up to 5 or 6 hours.

During this exercise in frustration, participants finger-point over who’s to blame. Meanwhile, business is disrupted, customer experience is diminished, and revenue losses wrack up as each hour passes.

What’s making troubleshooting more difficult? One culprit is the growing complexity of today’s application ecosystem. Simply gathering IT, NetOps, application developers, voice experts, WAN engineers, internet providers, colo site providers, cloud providers, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) vendors together is like herding cats. Then trying to pinpoint the problem and quickly resolve it can be an arduous task, to say the least.

Welcome to Complexity on Steroids

Saying current application ecosystems are more complex would be a massive understatement. Applications are, for the most part, no longer hosted in controlled company-owned data centers. Now they are everywhere—in the cloud or part of a SaaS or UCaaS service, or in a virtualized data center. In some cases, they’re in the middle of a migration. Essentially, the path of a transaction between a user and an application itself is virtually infinite.

This makes troubleshooting harder than ever. And with the current management tools at IT’s disposal, IT teams find themselves with plenty of data, but few answers. The legacy tools enterprises have relied on in the past may simply not be up to the monitoring tasks in modern digitally transformed environments. As a result, IT strategies may be lacking.

For those organizations that rely solely on vendor-only tools, when problems occur, the monitoring tools can identify whether the issues are occurring within the application hosting service, but they will be of no help if the problems are elsewhere. And the number of these tools can be staggering. A recent NETSCOUT-sponsored survey found that companies with $10 billion in revenue used more than 10 UCaaS tools and more than 25 SaaS tools. This didn’t even include the number of applications hosted in private data centers. Troubleshooting an application slowdown with this many tools in play can lead to chaos. This is why war rooms get fired up and can take weeks to solve a problem.

Pinpointing the true root cause of the problem requires end-through-end observability.

Quality Observability Leads to Faster MTTR

As we all know, disruptions and outages can lead to revenue loss, cost overruns, poor customer experience, employee productivity losses, or even risk of regulatory compliance issues and resultant fines. And in today’s social media age, the ability of influencers to cause reputational damage is worth keeping in mind. When problems occur, the whole world can know about them in nanoseconds.

This highlights the importance of ascertaining the source of problems quickly, so they can be solved just as rapidly. Ultimately, what is needed is a comprehensive, scalable, end-to-end observability solution that covers the overall communications ecosystem. Anything less is simply insufficient.

NETSCOUT’s Visibility Without Borders approach provides a single source of truth that pinpoints the root cause of the problem by using packet-based analysis.

The NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution ensures quality observability, which can have a dramatic impact on improving user experience, reducing mean-time-to resolve (MTTR) problems, and eliminating the need for war rooms—or at least drastically reducing the time spent in them. Via this single solution, IT gains early-warning insight from scheduled, consistent, synthetic, and business transaction testing, even during nonbusiness hours, which enables troubleshooting to begin in the early stages of a problem—often before end users are even aware, thus protecting the customer/employee experience.

Just to give a sense of what this means in practical terms, in the case of one enterprise, using the NETSCOUT solution reduced the time it took to resolve a disruption from 15 hours down to 15 minutes. Overall, NETSCOUT has been able to reduce time spent in the war room by 83 percent or more. By anyone’s standards, that is game-changing.

Thoughtful, strategic deployment of end-through-end ecosystem-wide monitoring and analysis—that zooms in on the problems for quick resolution rather than just ruling out one portion of the network as the source of the problem—is worth its weight in gold. Throwing away good money on maintenance contracts for legacy tools that will no longer provide answers to today’s complex problems is simply not the answer.

Vendor-independent, packet-based network and application performance observability with insights throughout the ecosystem is what is needed to pinpoint and quickly resolve problems. And being able to do away with war rooms is a side benefit everyone will appreciate.

Learn more about how you can improve observability within your network infrastructure by watching this insightful webinar series.