Improve Application Performance in Complex Multicloud Environments

Cloud application development moves much faster than we can keep up with, and the capacity of the cloud will continue to surprise us (hello there, shadow IT). A big focus for enterprises now is controlling the increasing complexity of multiservice, multicloud environments. But with multiple clouds, there’s no escaping complexity. 

“Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else.”
—Tesler’s Law, or The Law of Conservation of Complexity

The multicloud approach to enterprise cloud computing takes the hybrid-cloud model and introduces multiple public cloud service providers to meet a variety of needs. According to research such as Flexera’s State of the Cloud report, multicloud is still the most popular strategy among organizations, followed closely by hybrid cloud (see figure below).

High-performance digital services that run on cloud infrastructures, from customer engagement applications to internal operating services, allow modern businesses to be more agile, cost-effective, and competitive. As cloud providers bring new services to the market, how you apply cloud computing features will be a key differentiator in your application strategy.

Cloud Complexity Can Jeopardize Application Performance

Each cloud application has a unique set of constraints, ranging from development and maintenance costs to traffic volume and the value of future elasticity and scalability. Internet technology leaders are under immense pressure to deliver innovative, flexible services running high-end, cloud-centric, enterprise applications. These apps are expected to maintain connectivity and performance every time someone requests access. According to Flexera, “Apps siloed on different clouds and DR (disaster recovery)/failover between clouds have remained the top two multicloud implementations. Intelligent workload placement is increasing the fastest—up 20 percent year over year” (see figure below).

As systems become more distributed, methods for building and operating them are rapidly evolving—and that makes visibility into your services and infrastructure more important than ever. It’s common for developers to break up their applications into microservices, host them in containers across distributed cloud servers, and deploy them under the scrutiny of their DevOps colleagues. But it can be incredibly challenging for DevOps to track microservice dependencies throughout the service delivery path (apps, protocols, elements operating across remote campus, data centers, internet providers, cloud vendors, and so forth). On top of that, vendors—including cloud providers, application developers, wide-area network (WAN) developers, and internet service providers (ISPs)—may be reluctant to admit that a service disruption is theirs or may need definitive proof before performing analysis or a fix in their environments. Applications don’t fix themselves. They “break.” Breaks have consequences.

Pinpointing and fixing the root cause of application performance errors across complex multicloud and hybrid infrastructure is much harder when these environments change/evolve yearly. Running applications on infrastructure requires a unified view of physical, virtual, and cloud environments. In other words, total performance visibility across complex networks.

Companies cannot grow or adapt to change unless they first measure everything they do.

Deep Packet Inspection Unlocks All Knowledge from the Network

Due to the rapid growth of networking, nearly everything that can be added to a network is interconnected. The best monitoring solution provides precise, cloud-agnostic visibility that discovers and alerts organizations to application performance issues. 

To put it bluntly, every disruption has the potential to irreparably harm an organization that is not prepared.

Monitoring traffic in real time by analyzing packet data provides unparalleled visibility of application behavior, service dependencies, and error details and is the fastest way to find the root cause of problems. With NETSCOUT’s scalable deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, every transaction between every device, application, client, and network component can be precisely monitored, regardless of whether physical, virtual, cloud, or hybrid—on either side of the internet edge.

Because our advanced packet analytics, also known as Smart Data, occurs in real time at the monitoring point, our solutions work with any application and provide actionable context for measuring performance in ways that traditional packet and NetFlow solutions cannot.

NETSCOUT Customer Stories from the Field

Don’t just take our word for it. Here are a few success stories that illustrate how we helped customers solve network and application issues:

NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management Resolves Post‑Migration Application Latency Issues

After a global organization’s critical order fulfillment application moved to a public cloud, it became very slow and unresponsive. Given the complexity of the organization’s ecosystem and the importance of its application in the supply chain process, learn how the information technology (IT) team tackled this problem with nGenius Enterprise Performance Management and service edge visibility.

Troubleshoot Production Applications in Factories with NETSCOUT Visibility

Unplanned downtime in manufacturing facilities can have a significant impact on their ability to produce goods, deliver on promised schedules, and meet daily quotas. Discover how NETSCOUT helped a well-known manufacturer fix disruptions that could have cost comparable enterprises millions of dollars per hour.

Hospital Assures Quality Performance of Patient-Impacting Applications

This large hospital network, with more than a dozen hospitals and a hundred medical facilities, was opening a new data center to deliver critical application services for medical teams faster than before. Read how NETSCOUT solutions helped ensure the network’s critical patient-care services are available and running efficiently 24/7.

For more information about NETSCOUT’s network and application performance management solutions, contact us.