The Twilight Zone
Defined as an area of little visibility an area just beyond ordinary limits. Made famous by the Twilight Zone show that entered into the shadowy tip of reality: you’re on a through route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable.
My most vivid memory of this show was “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” with William Shatner who sees a gremlin trying to destroy the wing of the airplane he is flying home in. He is unable to convince anyone else on the plane that this is happening because the gremlin is invisible to anyone else. In the end, the plane lands and the distraught Shatner is put in an ambulance and the last scene shows the gremlin as the ambulance driver taking Shatner away.
What does that have to do with Network Performance?
Networks have an abundance of gremlins that can prevent your customers from reaching their application destination and in order to find and eliminate these, you must have complete visibility of all your network elements and connections in real time otherwise if you go looking for them later, they may have disappeared only to reappear later to disrupt another one of your users.
Luckily for you, today’s IP based networks consists of packets that carries the information through your network and those packets can be analyzed for bizarre, different or unexplainable things that affect your network to point out to you (and everyone else) where the gremlins are hiding.
Finding the Gremlins
First, establish and track the normal standard for your network as shown below. In other words, your day-to-day network data, facilities and elements operate in this fashion. Not to be mistaken for a security application, this capability does not rely on external database dips to identify gremlins but easily identify network changes that are caused by these facilities or element degradation and failures.
Add to that workflows that eliminate the manual intensive work associated with identifying the root cause of an issue that are triggered by user-defined alarms. The workflow finds the most probable root cause and provides the best solution.
Now you know in real time when a change in behavior signifies a service affecting condition and you can do something about it before your customers are affected. How would you like to know when a router is about to fail or when any router exceeds 80% capacity? How about knowing when a traffic path becomes congested, or when jitter or packet loss is about to affect your customers? Managing your network has just become much easier.
What does this software do?
Monitors all your applications and traffic as shown below, with machine learning and artificial intelligence to correlate all the data and then determine the cause of any gremlin and highlight the probable cause.
A complete network monitoring solution will have:
- 100% packet processing to create metadata for every network session
- Reports on network latency, jitter and application response
- Providing top users, top applications by traffic, latency/response for each session
- Establish a network behavior pattern and continuously compare it to the ongoing traffic to discover abnormal behavior using a correlation engine
- Automatic investigation of network gremlins using workflows and recommend a fix
- Provides alerts with underlying cause and repair recommendation thereby significantly reducing MTTR
- Complete visibility to ensure users always have applications availability excellence
