4 Network Monitoring challenges: Driving enterprise network visibility

According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime is around $5,600 per minute. That is around $300,000 per hour. Are you able to address and solve network issues, before it jolts the bottom line of your business?

The success of enterprises today is judged by the performance of its network. As enterprise networks evolve, become complex and advance, network monitoring continues to be a challenge for networking teams.  The need of the hour for networking teams is a centralized monitoring platform which will allow networking teams to proactively analyse and report on network, application performance, and issues across underlay and overlay network infrastructures. Before network failures, downtime, and attacks cause a havoc, networking teams should be able to resolve the issue.

Monitoring challenges of today’s network teams

In the age of cloud, most networking teams face the challenge to monitor distributed network ecosystems (on-prem and cloud). Network visibility, performance issue detection, and root cause analysis are few among many challenges, network teams face in their day to day monitoring activities.

The challenges for network monitoring are twofold: capturing and storing large amounts of data, and analysing the different types of data that is being transported- this  includes instant messaging, email applications, video streaming, and peer-to-peer connectivity, such as Slack. Below are few challenges that networking teams come across in their day to day activities –

End to end visibility over all devices – Enterprises daily run several applications such as Microsoft Office 365, Slack, video conferencing tools and applications, and so on. Failure of any of these applications can have serious consequences on day to day business operations. It can impact all functions like marketing, sales, and customer support. It is imperative for networking teams to have clear insight on every connected device, so that before the failure impacts other devices, IT teams can address and fix the failure.

Get network performance reports – Traditional network monitoring tools have become irrelevant in today’s distributed network ecosystem. This is simply because they lack the ability to provide granular visibility to massive volumes of network performance data produced each day. Using legacy monitoring tools and solutions allow network teams to focus only on basic metrics and health of network paths. It’s of no help for networking teams in today’s distributed and cloud driven network ecosystem. Almost all network teams grasp for visibility to data which is key to a successful network monitoring strategy. Performance insights (network availability, link Utilization,  top running applications and their usage, user scores, CPU utilization and so on) showcased in a dashboard helps network teams to identify any network issue in no time. It allows network teams to solve the problem even before users or customers, raises a ticket on the issue.

Avoid failures and downtimes – Preventing network outages, failures and downtime is one of the top key responsibilities of a network engineer or administrator. Bandwidth utilization, traffic, latency, CPU utilization are few key metrics network teams need to monitor rigorously. But what’s most important, is to receive information (alerts and notifications) well in advance during any network issues like failures and slowness is a common challenge in most networking teams. It’s here where legacy monitoring solutions fail. In order to identify and address the root cause, troubleshoot, and recommended necessary upgrades, networking teams requires real time alerts and notifications which will allow them act, analyse and solve the problem before the enterprise takes a hit at the bottom line, loosing millions.

Access to remote site insights – Given the volumes of data produced every day, monitoring multiple remote sites, branches, and mobile work forces, troubleshooting and maintaining network, maintaining and troubleshooting, responding to language (CoffeeScript, Node.js and TypeScript; C#; Python; and C/C++ ) specific stats across the probe site (Ping) and central for network administrators based in different locations are common challenges when it comes to monitoring network for a remote branch or location. Relying on legacy monitoring solutions in today’s distributed network ecosystem makes it hard for Network teams to Act, analyse and solve issues. If a branch looses connectivity it creates a havoc. Poor network performance can rapidly lead to application failure impacting branch/site/mobile work force productivity and ROI. Hence networking teams need to embrace monitoring capabilities to solely monitor performance and go beyond basic metrics to respond quickly to issues in remote locations.

Proactive Network Monitoring with better visibility-

Monitoring and maintaining heterogeneous enterprise network today creates new challenges for network administrators. In the absence of data visibility, it becomes hard for network teams to predict and monitor network issues. SD-WAN allows enterprise network teams to validate and analyse data of multiple network sources, and applications seamlessly from its built-in analytical feature of the controller. This helps network teams to solve and respond to business requirements faster. It allows networking teams to gain visibility into network and applications with respect to how users experience over your SD-WAN network.

To regulate WAN for optimal network experience for the end user or customer, it is imperative than ever before to adopt the right monitoring strategy. A comprehensive monitoring platform will allow you to save cost, improve MTTR, and mitigate failure/downtime costs.

If you’re struggling to get visibility and monitor your enterprise network, click here to know how Lavelle Networks SD-WAN solution suite can help you monitoring your network.