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Growing Up Is Hard To Do

By Roger Boivin

Many of us remember this old song:
I’ve been missing the sun And the nights spent burning I’ve been missing each of you Growing up is hard to do   Now we’ve all got our debts to pay And there’s no room left for us to play ‘Cause they only want something new Growing up is hard to do
That’s how life goes: you raise your children the best you know how, as your parents did for you, and soon they become teenagers and you know you have to, no matter how reluctantly, give them some freedom.   So, you set some rules and watch to make sure they stay within their bounds. Pretty soon you buy them a used car because you are tired of driving them around and after all, they’re teenagers and they don’t really want you around that much as they spread their wings.   As it turns out, they grow up just fine and become a valuable member of society, exceeding your expectations and making you proud. Now you have more time to enjoy your life and even enjoy grandchildren someday. Isn’t it about time you do the same for your network? As a network operator, your time is totally consumed with managing your performance and QoS to the point you have no time for anything else. Thankfully, you can treat your network as you did for your children and let it grow up. How?  By setting rules and being advised when rules are broken. Rather than waiting for the next failure to occur and being reactive, there is a better way.  Set the rules such as: 
  • Notify me when these routers or all routers exceed 80% capacity.  
  • Notify me when this traffic path becomes congested
  • Notify me when jitter or packet loss exceeds this threshold. 
  You set the rules and then make sure they are adhered to, the same way you did for your teenagers. Imagine how much easier managing your network has just become. You might even have time to take your wife out for lunch once in a while. What else can free up my time? You taught your children what is normal and expected behavior and as they matured, and they understood more and more what that meant. You can do the same for your network by creating a time-series database to establish a base of activities as “normal”, and then when something happens outside this “normal network,” you are notified so you can take action before the issue becomes service-affecting. Imagine if that occurs, the network investigates itself using workflows, discovers the probable root cause, and then lets you know the best solution to implement. Rather than raising yet another alarm and taking all your time investigating then solving the issue, the network does it for you.  You’re living the life of Reilly and you have time on your side again. How do I do it? Get away from network management as a reactive discipline. Take advantage of the latest Network Performance Management technology that provides a holistic view of the network by building analytics from processing and creating metadata for 100% of the packets traversing your network. The latest technology can manage any size network whether on-premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid environment. Add to that the fact that you can now get this Network Performance as a Service (NPaaS) eliminating much of the CAPEX and OPEX usually associated with implementing this time-saving solution and your boss will be forever grateful.  Maybe even giving you some extra time off.   Are you ready for your Network Performance Management to take flight and shine? Contact Cirries at [email protected] to learn more.