How Experience-Driven NetOps Helps Network Teams Regain Trust

The 2022 EMA Network Management Megatrends study makes uncomfortable reading for network professionals. Among many discoveries, it reveals that the percentage of network operations teams that are successful is in steep decline, from 49% in 2016 to 27% in 2022.

So why the drop? In the network operations center (NOC), companies rely on traditional NetOps tools that are standardized with operational workflows to triage up/down network issues backed by processes like alarms, events, faults, flows, and logs. They use these to troubleshoot, quickly find root-cause, escalate, open tickets, or isolate and resolve issues themselves.

However, the world is changing: the cloud, “work from anywhere” (WFA), and other disruptive events are upending conventional operational monitoring strategies. Indeed, EMA reveals this is the first year that network operations teams have recognized public cloud, SaaS applications, and cloud-native application architectures as the most critical drivers of their network management strategies.

And here’s the problem: Only 18% of organizations believe they are very effective at cloud monitoring using existing network tools.

With the advent of cloud, SaaS, WFA adoption, and the resultant lack of visibility, network teams need to route user experience metrics through these traditional, standardized operational workflows.

For example, EMA reports that in the average IT organization, end-users detect and report 31% of all service problems before network operations teams are aware of them. That degraded customer experience can quickly lead to lost productivity, diminished satisfaction, and damage to the brand.

End-user experience metrics integrated into your standard triage procedures ensure not only reliable network delivery but an exceptional user experience. This is key for NetOps teams to be successful.

EMA agrees: The study shows that enterprises with a cross-domain operations team are the most likely to be successful with network operations. Organizations that relied on a NOC were less successful. Moreover, EMA believes that cross-domain operations strategies will become more important as enterprises expand their use of the cloud.

Experience-driven NetOps

An approach such as Experience-Driven NetOps delivers the unified end-to-end network visibility needed to understand, manage, and optimize the performance of digital services – on whatever network they may be running on. The approach extends the monitoring reach into edge services, multi-cloud and SaaS, home wireless, and ISP networks, allowing the enterprise to see every communication path and degradation point for the entire end-user experience.

Drawing it all together

EMA believes that network operations teams are at a cloud crossroads. Most are struggling as the public cloud, SaaS applications, and cloud-native application architectures begin to drive IT strategy. According to EMA, “They need to modernize their tools.” Today’s toolsets are bloated, inefficient, and disconnected. They contribute to manual errors that degrade the network, and they are producing too many false alerts.

Experience-Driven NetOps provides a solution to legacy management tools, enhancing standard workflows with end-user experience data. The result? Complete, unified monitoring combined with a comprehensively rewarding user experience. This is how NetOps teams will rebuild end-user trust in managing the new network.

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