Written by Matt
Stevens, CEO of AppNeta
Network monitoring solutions come in all
shapes and sizes, from single-purpose tools that might only confirm app
availability, to full-fledged platforms that look at every packet on the
network and at each layer of the stack.
This variety shouldn't come as a surprise to
anyone who's been working in the networking trenches, as the rate of change in
how enterprises manage and deploy their network infrastructure has been fast
and furious over the past decade. Teams are retiring traditional architectures
in favor of cloud-delivered environments, offloading the management and
ownership of a lot of their network to third-party providers in the process.
In that same vein, forward-thinking
enterprises are quickly retiring their legacy applications and workflows for
SaaS solutions, which also takes a great deal of the traditional support burden
off of enterprise IT.
In practice, the road to cloud and SaaS isn't
always as seamless as promised. While enterprise IT is in charge of less
hardware, they're still the team that tends to get blamed first when
applications -- SaaS or otherwise -- and the network aren't meeting end user
expectations.
Hence, the critical importance of
comprehensive network monitoring. IT teams can't be running blind when they
migrate to cloud and undergo SaaS adoption: Just because the act of network
management is changing, the responsibilities of IT remains the same. Without
visibility into all corners of their networks -- from HQ to the branch office
-- IT's hands are tied when it comes to resolution, not to mention assigning
blame where it's rightly deserved.
To gain full visibility into modern hybrid
networks, teams need to strive towards a combination of monitoring methods that
provide insight into four critical areas: Network paths, packets, Web/SaaS
apps, and flow data.
Network
Paths
Monitoring network paths entails taking an
active approach to measuring the health and availability of the network
end-to-end, giving enterprise IT insight into where, exactly, along the app
delivery path an issue takes place.
A single network path can be as short as a
laptop connected to a local file server over the office Ethernet or wireless
LAN, or as long as a 35-hop, satellite-enabled WAN connection peering through
multiple ISPs around the Globe - and everything in between. Without insight
into each hop -- inclusive of potential delays or outages -- teams won't
readily have answers for end users when issues occur, let alone a clear path to
resolution.
Packets
Network packets represent the raw data that
teams often need to suss out the root cause of issues on a granular level.
While app discovery and conversation-level data is essential for understanding
the overall app landscape, packets offer the raw data sometimes necessary for
advanced performance analysis and troubleshooting.
The best way to identify the root cause of
issues at an enterprise level is to take a combined active and passive
approach; actively analyzing packet responses over the network to monitor the
delivery path of app data, and passive packet inspection to understand what
apps are currently in use over the network at a given time.
Web
Applications
With networks becoming increasingly
distributed, centralized IT teams need to have a continuous local perspective
into end-user experience even when they don't have a physical presence at a
given remote or branch locations.
A proactive monitoring solution would help
create a baseline of app performance from the end-user perspective through
synthetic scripting: Scripts emulate the paths and actions that end users
experience as an application and runs this test periodically to alert IT when
performance degrades.
Flow
data
By collecting flow data, a monitoring solution
can deliver a high-level, passive view of all network traffic, inclusive of all
the users, applications and remote offices the infrastructure is designed to
support. When teams have a better understanding of what applications are
actually using their network capacity, they can make better decisions about prioritizing
certain programs, setting new policies and taking active stances on
remediation.
By analyzing flows-sequences of packets from a
source to a destination, which may be another host, a multicast group, or a
broadcast domain-IT can isolate specific conversations for analysis. And when
teams are able to combine their flow data with packet-level insights, they can
pinpoint network usage to specific hosts and users on the network, giving
greater context into what's a tech issue and what's not.
At the end of the day, having visibility into
four dimensions of network performance data is so much more than a
"nice-to-have." The new reality of the modern enterprise network requires that IT teams have as much data
handy to stay ahead of the many potential pitfalls that are so common during
digital transformation.
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About the Author
Matt
Stevens is co-founder, CEO, President, and Chairman of AppNeta, the leader in
performance monitoring solutions built for the complex, distributed enterprise.
Prior to founding AppNeta, Matt was CTO of the Information and Event Management
(SIEM) business unit of RSA, The Security Division of EMC. He joined EMC after
the acquisition of Network Intelligence Corp., where he was co-founder,
President and CTO. While at RSA, Matt was also a member of EMC's Office of the
CTO, where his team had responsibility for EMC's overall strategic direction
for information security. Prior to Network Intelligence and RSA, Matt held
senior technology, sales, and marketing positions with NetApp, Solbourne
Computer and Harris Corporation.