Today’s Modern Infrastructures Have Evolved, Bringing New Performance Challenges

When it comes to the evolution of the modern network environment, all we can say is—we’ve come a long way, baby! Over the years, we’ve progressed from being Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)-enabled, operating private data centers that invariably included loads of applications, to today’s virtualized private data centers, colocation sites, and cloud-based applications. All of these innovations and more have made businesses much stronger as enterprises pursue revenue opportunities made possible by digital transformation investments.

Many of these innovations have delivered competitive differentiation, opening the door to business growth. However, with these advancements has come tremendous complexity within the network, making it far more challenging to ensure the performance of services. Troubleshooting problems has turned into a nightmare for IT professionals.

The Growing Need for Greater Observability

Observability is key to ensuring performance and user experience excellence in today’s modern environments. In the past, IT professionals had total control over their IT environment, but as a result of digital transformation, that control is now shared outside of the organization, making it far more difficult to monitor systems and address problems quickly. The shift from a simplified environment to a very complex one has made end-through-end observability a necessity. This level of observability is imperative for performance assurance, for user experience analysis, and for troubleshooting. A lack of observability leaves networks and applications in danger of suffering slowdowns or outages that emerge and grow unabated.

Failure to ensure performance and user experience has significant consequences, such as impacts to revenue, damage to business reputation, compliance concerns and risk of fines, and the high cost of mitigating problems. You need only look at the recent news headlines to see numerous instances of high-profile businesses that have suffered this fate. 
               
Putting an Observability Strategy in Place Is Imperative

For all the planning IT organizations conduct during digital transformation initiatives, it is surprising that an enterprisewide observability strategy often is not part of that thinking. Reliance on a legacy network-monitoring tool is a recipe for disaster. The vast majority of these tools have not kept up with new technologies and are incapable of identifying and mitigating problems in these complex environments. Elongated delays in resolving slowdowns puts businesses at tremendous risk for revenue loss and poor customer experiences.

Without a modern observability solution, IT ends up with incomplete data, which leads to incomplete analysis. Blind spots are created by physical demarcation, ownership change, topology interconnections, protocol conversions, virtualization, and adoption of cloud services. Monitoring is absolutely needed for applications hosted in colos and the cloud, as well as employee connection, points to the network, including VPN, VDI, SD-WAN, and SASE. It is also needed in cases of software-as-a-service (SaaS) or unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solutions; virtualized environments in private clouds; and with critical industry apps, custom apps, and unified-communications-and-collaboration (UC&C) services.

Unfortunately, the monitoring tools offered by third-party providers can’t sufficiently fill the visibility gaps on their own. They simply are unable to show the transactions throughout the enterprise, which is needed to pinpoint and address problems effectively. As a result, extensive use of war rooms with numerous participants is needed, which ends up being costly and time-consuming. And even then, problems are rarely solved as quickly as necessary.

When end-through-end observability is missing, problems have room to grow and become far more disruptive. IT visibility, enterprise-wide, is necessary for coverage and control throughout the entire ecosystem—both the legacy and modern portions of the communications path.

Learn to Love the Packets

The right observability strategy should include the use of a holistic, vendor-independent enterprisewide performance management solution—one that provides the information needed to achieve rapid problem resolution in today’s highly complex IT environments. NETSCOUT offers a superior approach to delivering what we call Visibility Without Borders via the use of packet data, which is the most truthful, valuable data source available for any network monitoring. Network packets are the best source of information about what’s happening within applications across the wired network.

The sheer volume of data flowing across the network makes finding problems a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack. Some data creates false positives, sending IT down a rabbit hole. NETSCOUT solves these problems, refining the analysis so IT receives the essential information necessary for finding the true root cause of the problem so that quick remediation can occur. NETSCOUT combines packet monitoring in a passive manner with the onboard ability to look at synthetic testing of user experience activity. This allows IT to perform business transaction tests in a proactive manner, allowing teams to be alerted as soon as the network starts to degrade—even when users are not using the system. In this way, IT can start troubleshooting problems before anyone is impacted.

IT would be well advised to do an observability audit and deploy new technology in their digitally transformed environment. Throwing away good money on maintenance contracts for legacy tools that no longer provide answers to modern, complex problems is not the answer. NETSCOUT’s best-in-class solutions can help enterprises gain the observability needed to generate exceptional performance and user experience for customers and employees. With NETSCOUT’s help, IT can monitor any vendor environment, any network, any cloud, and any service anywhere, for any user. This is the surest way to lower mean time to repair (MTTR), eliminate finger-pointing, and ensure the business runs smoothly.

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