Fast networks get business done. We all know it and live it. Productivity rises, customers are happy, transactions occur. All helping to grow enterprises. But the engine that drives this success is performance and optimization of that network.
But it’s not just a singular business that is affected by good network performance. It can be entire industries since today’s businesses are comprised of chains of applications – inside and outside of an organization. All of which contribute to the success or failure of a business. Application servers, middleware, cloud are examples of all of the elements that must be on the same wavelength because if one contributes to a performance degradation on the network, they all do.
When something goes wrong, IT operations, development and network teams need to quickly isolate and locate the source of the problem, and be sure the actions they take will mitigate it, not make it worse. It’s like a row of dominoes. If one falls, the rest do.
A unified performance analytics solution is the best way to alleviate a possible breakdown that affects multiple parts of the network. Businesses can benefit in four significant ways.
- Troubleshoot faster. One of the biggest pain-points for enterprises is the lack of available insights and fragmented analytics. Businesses need a holistic view of everything going on – from the network to the middleware and up into the cloud. This is where traditional monitoring solutions tend to fail. Visibility to one part of the network and not the others defeats the purpose and creates blind spots. This reduces an organization’s ability to diagnose a problem. Businesses need access to data in real-time to accelerate diagnostics; IT teams can then quickly and easily pinpoint if and where a problem is occurring along the application or network chain, and allocate the right resources to fix it in real-time. Unlike traditional monitoring tools, a unified performance analytics solution positively contributes to the reduction of Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and allows an increase in IT productivity, with end-users getting time back on what would have traditionally been spent on troubleshooting and diagnosing an issue.
- Reduced degradations.Being able to ‘see’ more of the network isn’t just valuable for troubleshooting. Enterprises are often at the mercy of network and application degradations. If something fails, enterprises have few ways of understanding why and how it could be prevented in the future. By being able to see everything as it happens, and proactively monitor applications and the network, organizations are better positioned to not only understand degradations when they happen and why, and also to also predict when another might occur. Any unified performance solution should include integrated predictive analytics. By using machine learning algorithms IT teams can identify capacity and performance degradations from sophisticated traffic patterns and infrastructure dependencies that are beyond human analysis.
- Reduce risk. A 360-degree view of application monitoring is today’s exception not the norm. This is especially the case when it comes to migrating applications to virtualized and hybrid cloud environments. While there are several benefits to these environments, they also present risks. Enterprises without the right level of visibility are blind to the flow of applications during migrations resulting in possible delays. Providing IT teams with an end-to-end view of applications, even when outside enterprise network and application layers, helps to avoid project delays and minimizes any negative impact on ROI. It is this detailed view where baseline performance, the impact migration can have on it, that can help IT teams make smart decisions about the resources needed to ensure a smooth and successful migration.
- Drive better collaboration. When it comes to driving collaboration between IT teams, unified performance applications can provide a greater understanding of how the applications and the network are being used, IT teams can share a collective view of where the quality of experience (QoE) can be improved and then encourage collaboration between teams to identify and resolve a problem or degradation. The proliferation of new software development techniques or practices such as DevOps and microservices will make this become especially important. New innovations often lead to fragmentation and more silos with legacy or older solutions when they can’t play in the sandbox with the new ones. This is where traditional monitoring tools fall down and when disparate elements of the application and network chain need to be seen. This where a holistic view, provided by a unified performance application, can step in and drive collaboration between the new and the old guard ultimately boosting digital transformation efforts. This can also benefit the management of your external providers (outsourcers, application, cloud and network service providers) and help to obtain faster responses from them.
Guaranteeing a positive end-user experience is difficult with a growing number of elements to monitor and assure throughout the entire application and network chain. Traditional monitoring tools are capable of giving a view of one or the other but not both. Businesses cannot continue to bear the brunt of monitoring solutions that don’t fit– if they do, they risk losing significant revenue. A unified performance analytics solution can provide enterprises with the ability to identify and resolve degradations and put companies in a better position to optimize the end user experience. And with complex digital transformation projects and shifts to new virtualized environments, isn’t this what businesses need?
