In the Beginning

In the early days, device health, ping tests, traceroute, and utilizing the command line interface (CLI) were the main tools to discover network performance issues. . As networks continued to scale and grow in complexity, and as applications migrated to the cloud, these tools became only a small part of an overall network performance management solution.

The next evolution of network performance tools resulted in a plethora of fragmented sets of third-party monitoring and troubleshooting tools. By themselves, they performed adequately, but unfortunately did not coalesce with each other, leading to extended troubleshooting time. Cirries estimates that 40% of network managers use 4 to 10 tools to monitor and troubleshoot the network, and another 35% use 11 or more tools.

Next Generation Network Observability is here

Network Performance Management and Diagnostics (NPMD) tools, Application Performance Management (APM) tools and Digital Experience Management (DEM) tools must work in concert to provide a comprehensive  view of the network performance as seen by the user.  Anything short of that will lead to loss of users and competitiveness. This overall function encompassing NPMD, APM and DEM is encompassed in Next Generation Network Observability. 

How do you ensure Network Excellence?

Deploying Next Generation Network Observability ensures the network performance, application performance and digital experience KPIs are met. This tool must automatically identify and resolve network connectivity issues to maximize the end-user’s quality of experience and overall network performance.

Next Generation Network Observability includes Machine Learning and bots to discover and automatically identify and eliminate network anomalies in real time. It’s time you let your network monitoring tools keep up with the changing network landscape. Next Generation Network Observability manages the millions of applications, processes, and network data points of your network. The data is filtered, dissected, and humanized to be useful.

Why is Next Generation Network Observability needed?

Simply put, humans can no longer keep up with the hundreds of alarms being generated and have no idea which are the most critical.

Next Generation Network Observability reduces investigation of alerts from hours to minutes or even seconds. 

Next Generation Network Observability uses algorithms to parse data, learn from it, and decide or predict without requiring explicit instructions. Imagine combining quality data, domain expertise, and syntax (metrics, classifiers, root causes, correlations, and ranking) to provide predictive recommendations on how to avoid infections and to offer actionable insights on how to remediate existing issues. 

These algorithms can also provide machine learning capabilities which include:

Time-series anomaly detection

• These algorithms can detect time series anomalies with a correlation, giving them the ability to quickly find relationships between events that would not be obvious to even a seasoned network specialist.

Event correlation and root cause analysis

• Additionally they use  various data-mining techniques to explore terabytes of data in a matter of minutes. This ability quickly identifies what network elements are most related to a network performance problem, accelerating resolution.

Self-correcting

• Next Generation Network Observability-driven networks capture and analyze  data to correlate events not normally detected without the analysis of a massive amount of data over time. This allows them to identify  problems and provide the most probable actions to fix using workflows.

Next Generation Network Observability can discover anomalies caused by congestion, application latency, equipment failures or an infection, network events caused by changes in utilization levels, memory leaks and other abnormalities. The machine-learned driven baselining and alerting technology automatically knows what is normal and what is not, alerting when an anomaly occurs.

Bots

Next Generation Network Observability solutions not only deploy and integrate effectively from data collection and reporting standpoints, but also provide an open architecture for integrating with upstream fault management and trouble ticketing systems. Besides the ability to send and receive trap notifications, the operator can “launch-in-context” instant reports when they are troubleshooting an infection or outage and need detailed network health data.

How Do I Do It Right?

Installing a Next Generation Network Observability solution is an excellent way to foster a high quality end user experience and to optimize network performance. It will absorb the data, eliminate duplicates, discard irrelevant bits, correlate the needed data, examine the packet data in real-time, send alerts when the data contains an unusual event, automatically investigate using bots, and then store ALL data in a time-series database for longer term event analysis. This gives you the ability to discover dubious or abnormal behavior and assist in network growth planning.

Summary

The evolution of the Network mandates change, including the combination of three key elements in ensuring Quality of Experience ; NPMD, APM, and DEM. Next Generation Network Observability provides this in a holistic package, that allows continuous calculation of network and business KPI’s to ensure performance demands and tolerances are met for all traffic. www.cirries.com