Any IT manager worth his salt knows that a corporate network cannot function efficiently without some degree of network performance management. But with corporate networks becoming increasingly complex and required to support increasingly sophisticated applications, how many can safely claim that their network monitoring and performance management systems are still up to the job?
Today’s business networks have become very complex systems that depend on the reliable performance of thousands of interconnected applications and devices. In the event that any of those components degrade or fail, the performance of the business itself is in jeopardy.
Bandwidth-intensive applications like VOIP and IPTV, real-time online communication and collaboration tools, cloud computing, and social media are now common features of the business environment and are putting enormous pressure on the corporate network. Meanwhile, increasing network complexity has produced many more potential points of degradation and failure, from an excavator cutting a cable in the field to a misconfigured firewall device restricting business-critical network traffic through the center. of data.
But while IT administrators may be aware of the risks associated with network downtime or degradation, the shocking truth is that they often rely on legacy network performance management tools that cannot scale to handle all of them. their networks, they cannot monitor degradation events in real time or simply too expensive to implement on more than a small subset of their networks.
Our customers tell us that there are two main reasons why they don’t update their network performance monitoring tools; Either the IT team doesn’t have the resources to oversee an upgrade project (let alone manage the reports that the tools will generate) or they don’t have a budget. Let’s tackle each objection in turn.
Lack of bandwidth:
With many overworked and understaffed IT departments, it’s easy to understand the concern that upgrading network management software will consume administration time that they simply don’t have. As networks have become more complicated, many IT managers have found that managing applications across networks has been fragmented into a wide range of monitoring technology and product options, and disparate processes. As a result, the reports they generate are increasingly difficult to decipher and interpret. Recently, one of our customers spent eight weeks trying to create a specific report using a legacy network performance management application. After two months of frantically pulling his hair out, he gave up and eventually resorted to creating a report himself by hacking into Oracle’s database from the backend of his network monitoring software and putting the details into an Excel spreadsheet, a complicated solution that took another two weeks and was not possible. it is not reusable.
However, more complex networks don’t have to translate into more complex reports. Performance management systems have advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years and there are now tools available that have not only evolved technologically, but are much more intuitive and easy to use. Therefore, the specific report required in the client example above can now be instantly created and automated using a new advanced performance management system. The latest technology can scale from the smallest to the largest networks and can be easily expanded to monitor new types of devices as they emerge on the market. Modern and ubiquitous infrastructure components, such as new routers, switches, access points, and load balancers, are automatically discovered as soon as they are added to networks. With this level of network-wide visibility, the IT department must be able to see the raw historical performance of the network, understand what is happening in real time, and make projections with detailed reports that can be generated in seconds instead of hours. .
Lack of budget:
So what about the cost argument? In today’s economic climate, companies are understandably reluctant to invest in anything other than the most business-critical applications. But look at it this way, if a company does not have visibility into the profiles of the bandwidth-consuming applications in their environment, how do they ensure their availability and guarantee their performance on the network?
Saving money by not updating network monitoring software is a false economy. The only alternative for organizations with little visibility into their infrastructure is to blindly devote people, time, and resources to an IT problem in the hope that it will go away. Trying to troubleshoot a performance problem without the right tools robs both IT and business users of productivity.
The network is now the foundation of any IT infrastructure. It doesn’t matter how good your applications are, if you virtualize your data center, or if you have the most powerful servers in the world running your data center. If those applications or their individual components cannot communicate with each other or their servers cannot communicate with each other or with back-end databases, the application simply will not work, no matter how powerful or expensive it is. Simply put, if the network is not working efficiently, all this great technology is simply a wasted investment.
Years ago, network monitoring was a massive investment that often took years before any return was realized, by which time the technology had advanced. Today is a different story; Network performance management systems can be significantly less expensive and can offer demonstrable value almost immediately. Five years ago, network performance might have been seen as an IT department issue, but today, customers also need open access to network performance data to monitor SLAs and provide insight. best customer service.
Comprehensive network performance management is no longer a luxury but a business necessity. Modern technology is not only capable of unlimited scalability, managing every element of the network, but it is also affordable and easy to use, even for users who are not specialists in network management. When faced with the facts, the arguments that managing network performance is too expensive or time-consuming simply don’t work anymore.