The Increasingly Complex Job of Optimizing Network Performance

As digitization efforts progress and network complexity increases, IT organizations are feeling the heat to ensure flawless performance. A recent study found that over the last three years, 96 percent of enterprise ITOps teams have been under pressure to work at least 25 percent faster, and more than half indicated they’ve been asked to work 50 percent faster over the same time period.

The need to solve problems faster is made all the more difficult by the continuously changing nature of IT applications and infrastructure.  As a result of this increasingly complex environment —which often encompasses on-premises data centers, wide-area network (WAN), and local campus networks, and multicloud and hybrid multicloud platforms—IT teams find themselves accumulating monitoring tools and vast amounts of data. It is not uncommon for ITOps to rely on dozens or more tools, which, in and of itself, creates chaos.

Key to optimizing network and application performance is observability. Observability is essential for:

• Achieving better SLA performance
• Improving alignment and communications between ITOps, NetOps, and SecOps teams
• Reducing operational costs and risk
• Speeding up time to detect and resolve problems
• Improving the user experience
• Tying IT operations to business KPIs

Bigger Doesn’t Always Mean Better

One of the stumbling blocks to effective observability is the immense volume of data being collected. Data gathered by NetOps, ITOps, and SecOps teams tends to end up in different silos, where it is not easily accessible by respective teams. On top of that, enormous volumes of data come with significant costs for storage. Some organizations are instead using sampling techniques to reduce the volume of data. Others are limiting their monitoring and cutting back on applications that enable observability because of the high cost of the data and/or the tools needed to manage the sheer volume collected.

To achieve true observability, IT teams need to look at all of that data in a ubiquitous way across the entire enterprise infrastructure. This means taking a consistent, comprehensive approach that includes all of the different edges, applications, and services that are running. Plus, it needs to be in real time. And then the data must be used in an intelligent manner, so IT doesn’t have to forensically put pieces back together in order to figure out where things were. It all boils down to having the right data from the right sources, which will allow IT to understand exactly what is the root cause of any problems. The key is to get those answers quickly, efficiently, and equitably.

The Power of Enriched Observability

Many observability strategies rely on metrics, logs, and traces from across the environment. The shortcoming of this approach is that things such as logs can be manipulated, making them less reliable as a source of information. Instead, using wire data from the network offers an unimpeachable source of truth. NETSCOUT’s concept of enriched observability involves collecting packet data in real time and integrating it with other sources of data to deliver a complete picture. This intelligent metadata offers context and added details about what’s going on in the network communication paths between users and applications or between one application and another to reveal the root cause of problems, empowering IT to resolve them faster. Not only are performance issues identified, but security threats as well, making these insights invaluable to NetOps, ITOps, and SecOps teams alike. Enhanced observability is also critically important in equipping service providers and cloud platform providers with evidence of problems, supplying definitive proof that the issue is in fact their responsibility.

Observability Perfected

Dealing with tool and data sprawl can create serious pain for IT teams, who end up spending too much time, effort, and resources in trying to overcome observability challenges. Teams can address this by having enhanced observability that is enriched, ensuring they have the right data from the right sources. This is essential as networks become more complex and the need to solve problems faster becomes more acute.

For more insights on how to achieve enhanced observability, watch the webinar “Beyond Troubleshooting: Network Observability Boons, Challenges & Successes.”