By Eileen Haggerty, AVP, Product and Solutions Marketing, NETSCOUT
In 2025, a three-hour network outage grounded an entire airline’s fleet. A software bug shut down a state agency for two days. And a Domain Name System (DNS) issue took approximately 15 hours from detection to remediation.
What is most startling, however, is not the fragility of these systems, but our reaction to their failure: 97% of IT teams still launch war rooms to resolve their problems, according to a NETSCOUT survey of 319 IT professionals at Cisco Live in June. This reliance is perplexing, as the war room tactic has been widely criticized for its ineffectiveness, protracted troubleshooting, and reliance on disparate data sources rather than a single source of truth.
If you ask yourself, “How fast can my organization identify and recover from an outage?” and the answer is unacceptable, you are not alone. In Enterprise Management Associates’ April 2025 study “Enterprise Strategies for Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Networks,” the IT research and consulting firm reported that only 29 percent of survey respondents were fully satisfied with their monitoring solution.
That dissatisfaction signals a larger problem: IT teams are often working without the comprehensive, real-time visibility needed to diagnose and resolve issues quickly. Such a limitation becomes a liability in a war room. Each team, whether NetOps, SecOps, CloudOps, or application, interprets the issue through its own siloed and cluttered toolset. This siloed scenario generates multiple, conflicting ‘truths’ that paralyze decision-making, waste valuable time, and prolong an outage.
With the time and money spent on modernizing networking and applications with digital transformations, now may be the right time to evaluate the observability strategy. Existing tools may have gaps in coverage throughout the new infrastructure or may not have the depth and scale to show symptoms of problems or reveal underlying causes.
To eliminate any gaps and end the use of war rooms, IT teams must augment their approach with greater network observability to provide much-needed context, including leveraging deep packet inspection (DPI) to gain a deeper understanding of what is truly happening across their network, contextualize the events, and quickly identify the root cause of the issue.
How to Lower MTTx with DPI: Network Observability That Ends the War Room Cycle
DPI analyzes network traffic in real-time by inspecting packets, which offer proactive and predictable insights into application, service, and network behavior and performance. Packet data reveals the ‘why’ behind an issue, complementing synthetic testing, which identifies the ‘what.’ It is the single source of truth, something war rooms often lack, allowing stakeholders to collaborate using the same data.
For instance, consider a few scenarios where DPI can help pinpoint where in the ecosystem the issue exists and the community of users it is impacting:
- A DNS failure: DPI can show that the network is working, but the DNS is misconfigured.
- A software update breaks a dependency: DPI can reveal the app sending a bad query that the database is actively rejecting.
- A configuration change impacts service delivery: DPI can identify a specific user group being blocked by a network device, like a firewall.
This level of observability is most valuable in today’s complex, hybrid-cloud environments. Here, a single issue can cross dozens of systems, involving multiple teams and third-party vendors. When problems span these operational silos, blame is easily deflected. DPI provides the objective, verifiable evidence to end the ‘finger-pointing’ and identify the source of the problem, whether it’s internal or with a vendor.
While only 9.6% of organizations currently use DPI for troubleshooting, it’s telling that 83% of respondents from enterprises with 10,000 or more employees state that DPI is ‘important or very important’ for determining root causes, solving problems faster, and better understanding issues. Notably, half of these respondents rank DPI as very important, underscoring its perceived value in complex environments.
DPI as a Business Enabler
DPI eliminates blind spots between systems and accelerates mean time to resolution, which does more than just shorten an outage and prevent significant revenue loss. It directly reduces the significant organizational cost of the troubleshooting process itself.
War rooms pull in staff from across the business, as Atlassian notes, teams from IT to the C-Suite and marketing are all involved in incident management. This is particularly acute among technical teams: Cisco’s 2024 Global Developer report found that 57% of developers spend more time resolving issues than building new features, diverting them from critical innovation.
The continued use of war rooms is a symptom of incomplete observability. As recent, public outages suggest, observability strategies have not kept up with the demands of modernization of corporate infrastructures. With so much of infrastructure modernization tied to competitive differentiation, revenue, and customer service, DPI offers the missing context, a unified, ground-truth view of how systems actually behave. With packet-level visibility, IT organizations can finally move from reactive firefighting to proactive assurance and predictable insights replacing frantic, costly late-night war rooms with data-driven confidence.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eileen Haggerty is an area vice president of Product and Solutions Marketing at NETSCOUT. In this role, she is responsible for working with enterprise customers to ensure that NETSCOUT’s service assurance and cybersecurity solutions meet the needs of our customers and the market.
Before joining NETSCOUT, she held various technical marketing roles at Motorola Codex, Racal Data Group, and Celox Networks. Eileen has an MBA from Boston College.
