NETSCOUT Launches Industry-First Smart Edge Monitoring

Today’s digital business models have transformed the way many companies operate, giving employees greater flexibility to work remotely as well as in the office. In response, NETSCOUT has reimagined service assurance for the hybrid enterprise with NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring—a new, patent-pending architecture that combines smart data analytics with synthetic transaction testing. With Smart Edge Monitoring, IT teams gain complete visibility and insights to deliver top-quality user experience across networks or applications, regardless of where end users perform their jobs.

“IT organizations face big decisions in managing and advancing their networks and management approaches, which became even more urgent during the pandemic on multiple fronts—from operations to optimization, from resolution to readiness, and from core and cloud to edge and client,” says Mark Leary, research director for network analytics at IDC. “To address the next normal in network management, ITOps needs to be able to diagnose whether applications, clients, services, or network infrastructure are causing performance problems. Here, it is vital to pinpoint and resolve service degradation issues across any domain rapidly and accurately.”

Smart Edge Monitoring overcomes one of IT’s biggest challenges in problem identification and resolution in complex, multivendor environments. By using integrated analysis, the solution quickly understands what the end-user experience is and exactly why issues are occurring. As a result, this unique solution drives significant reductions in time to resolution for any application issue, including SaaS, UCaaS, VoIP, video, and data.

By combining synthetic testing and packet analysis, Smart Edge Monitoring detects emerging problems as early as possible, helping IT teams quickly pinpoint why and where they are happening. Although historically, siloed tools might have provided either the why or where analysis, Smart Edge Monitoring merges the two with integrated analysis and logical workflows that dramatically reduce end-user impact and the time required to solve complex issues. Example use cases include:

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). When users at home, branch or remote offices, or headquarters experience poor performance on platforms such as Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, Smart Edge Monitoring identifies problems, including join-meeting delays and poor audio and video quality.

Work-from-Home. With a significant percentage of companies operating a hybrid workforce model, Smart Edge Monitoring provides early detection of performance degradation with analysis throughout the transaction ecosystem—from home-user network; across the WAN; to data center, application, and database servers; and to cloud and SaaS providers—to quickly pinpoint the problem.

Cloud. Cloud migrations can have gaps in visibility that lead to performance challenges post-launch. Smart Edge Monitoring baselines the user experience before, during, and after cutover to cloud-based applications to help mitigate such issues.

“The reality is that the massive shift toward remote work over the past year has exposed fundamental blind spots,” says Michael Szabados, chief operating officer at NETSCOUT. “When performance problems begin to develop for the remote user, our smart data transaction tests act much like a smoke detector alerting of a potential problem, which subsequently can be quickly extinguished with the powerful nGeniusONE service triage workflows.”

Available immediately, Smart Edge Monitoring comprises nGeniusPULSE nPoints at user locations, including home or remote offices, and InfiniStreamNG at strategic network, data center, and cloud locations, with Omnis Cloud Adaptor providing packet-based analysis on synthetic testing. These data sources leverage NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology to provide smart data for smarter analytics with nGeniusPULSE and nGeniusONE Service Assurance platforms.

Please visit NETSCOUT’s Smart Edge Monitoring web page to learn more.