Don’t buy into the hype of network observability to realize digital transformation success

For today’s teams, it is exceedingly complex and costly to support multiple generations of infrastructure and applications. What’s worse, according to an IDC report on network observability, this is the number one challenge to achieving digital transformation success.

The right data will lead you to the right root cause

The reality is that teams lost visibility and control when workloads started moving to cloud and SaaS environments. To get that visibility and control back, you need to be able to collect, correlate, and contextualize network and user experience data from all networks—whether you own the infrastructure or not.

Today, it is actually possible to realize complete network monitoring visibility, even across multiple generations of network infrastructure. You can establish unified views of bare metal infrastructures, VMs, and containers, even those hosted in ISP, cloud, and SaaS environments. 

In action: Full NetOps visibility and control

I recently caught up with an IT executive at a U.S.-based financial services institution. This organization provides services to banks all over the nation. When the organization began migrating services and workloads to the cloud and adapting to hybrid work realities, they realized they had an urgent network monitoring need. Customer and employee services were suddenly reliant upon internal corporate networks, ISPs, and cloud service providers. When customers and employees encountered downtime and performance issues, they needed to be able to quickly identify which domain the problem was arising in.

Their team was able to establish the comprehensive network monitoring capabilities outlined above, including across ISP networks, their data centers, and the cloud. Now, they’re tracking the user experience, no matter where customers or employees are located.

This visibility provided immediate dividends. For example, when a banking customer began reporting timeouts and latency issues, the financial service firm’s NetOps team was able to quickly identify the cause of the issue: a misconfigured load balancer running on the customer’s network. This is a great example of how teams can improve mean time to innocence (MTTI) when they have the right data in front of them. The NetOps team could quickly determine the issue wasn’t arising in their environment.

Not only does this provide significant improvement in operational efficiency and service levels, but it enables better, more proactive customer service. As a senior systems manager with the financial services firm stated, “We showed the customer that we really do care about them and their business, and we can continue to improve the outcomes our services provide.”

Conclusion

Everyone is talking about network observability today, but any industry analyst or seasoned IT veteran will agree: network observability is really just about having a network monitoring system that collects a complete and diverse set of network data and delivers actionable insights. By harnessing these capabilities, this financial services firm was able to improve network delivery, optimize the user experience, maintain business continuity, and achieve better business outcomes.

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