Network Observability: It’s for a Lot More Than Troubleshooting

As companies increasingly rely on mission-critical applications and services across remote sites, observability throughout expanded networks to troubleshoot problems is more important than ever. There is no doubt that reducing outage risk and application performance degradation is vital to any business, but network observability holds the potential to do so much more.

Observability can be crucial in supporting business objectives. By reducing network disruptions, IT can help to protect the end-user experience, which impacts top-line results. Stickier user experiences hold the potential to improve revenues. The bottom line is also improved by achieving better cost and resource optimization. When networks work flawlessly, employees are more productive.

Network observability is also vital for enhancing an organization’s overall security posture. Network observability systems may see much of the same traffic that security monitoring tools do, but they bring a slightly different perspective that can be very complementary, and therefore helpful to SecOps teams. This can lead to faster incident identification and reduced mean time to repair (MTTR).

Another benefit of improved network observability is better collaboration within the organization, providing a wide range of stakeholders with an independent set of data that can fuel better decision-making.

More Bang for Your Buck

As organizations make investments in observability tools, they should be focusing on getting the most bang for their buck. This means having an overall network observability strategy that looks beyond troubleshooting. All too often, data and decisions are siloed within an organization—with security teams focused on protecting the network, network teams focused on uptime and network performance, and applications teams focused exclusively on applications—making it difficult to share vital information.

By taking a more strategic viewpoint of network visibility, it becomes possible to look at the network as a whole. When sourced correctly—which means getting the right data at the right time from the right places—observability across the entire network can play a key role in supporting both cyber and digital resilience.

An effective observability strategy should be aimed at achieving greater situational awareness, thus allowing for the implementation of predictive measures that get ahead of problems. With such a proactive approach, companies can make sure they are not only assuring business today but can enrich capabilities tomorrow.

By tapping into rich, high-fidelity data found within the network, organizations can achieve important objectives, such as improving new technology deployment times and reducing the challenges around upgraded technologies. Examples of these might be migrations from MPLS to SD-WAN technologies. Corporate processes or observability best practices can include before-, during-, and after-migration analysis. This would ensure IT staff had an understanding of the typical user experience before migration; that business continuity was being met during transition; and that user experience with the WAN connectivity was equivalent to what employees had prior to migration. Potential issues caught early in the project can help to avoid impacting the larger community of users and ultimately may result in accelerating overall deployment.

What This Means in Practical Terms

In practical terms, the business impact of network observability might involve, for instance, gaining a better understanding of the performance of medical devices. In the case of physicians, nurses, or laboratory technicians, being able to rely on the availability, functionality, and performance of critical healthcare devices is key to the quality of care delivered for individual patients.

Another example is in the ongoing shift to an Internet of Things (IoT)-based world where everything is always on. High-quality observability data can be instrumental in billing, manufacturing, and other business processes. It is also going to be crucial as the world makes a rapid shift toward an artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps)-driven set of decision-making. The best AI systems will require high-fidelity, high-quality data. Network observability offers the best source of information for AIOps algorithms.

The Sheer Scope of Observability Needed

As more and more enterprises have shifted workloads, such as unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS)- and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based applications and deployments, into the cloud, the need for end-through-end observability has increased dramatically. Network, application, and security teams can all benefit from a highly effective network observability strategy that includes cloud, colos, remote sites, and data centers.

Such a strategy is about not only capturing data from across the network, but also processing, analyzing, and determining the significant indicators that are needed to take necessary action. The key is having the ability to collect the right data from the right locations, anywhere within the network infrastructure. Delivering Visibility Without Borders is a bedrock principle of NETSCOUT solutions, which rely on high-fidelity data obtained from deep packet inspection (DPI) at scale.

By relying on protocol intelligence from across the network, organizations can not only feed network, application, and security teams observability insights into what’s happening in the network but also can provide the business context needed to ensure successful and resilient operations.

Beyond troubleshooting, a solid network observability strategy can help businesses on both their top and bottom lines, as well as being a strategic asset for competitive advantages and ensuring customer satisfaction and business agility.

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