Is Your Network Monitoring Equipment Still Working for You?

Today's enterprise networks have evolved in to highly complex systems dependent on the reliable performance of thousands of interconnected applications and devices. In the event any of those parts degrades or fails, the performance of the business itself is in jeopardy.

Any IT Manager worth his salt knows a corporate network cannot run effectively without some degree of network performance management. But with corporate networks becoming progressively more complex and being necessary to support increasingly sophisticated applications, how plenty of can confidently claim their network monitoring and performance management systems are still up to the job?

But whilst IT managers may be aware of the risks associated with network degradation or downtime, the shocking truth is they often depend on legacy network performance management tools which cannot scale to handle their whole networks, are unable to monitor real-time degradation events or are basically expensive to deploy over over a tiny subset of their networks.

Bandwidth-hungry applications such as VOIP and IPTV, real-time online communication and collaboration tools, cloud computing, and social networking are now common features of the business surroundings and are placing immense pressure on the corporate network. Meanwhile, increasing network complexity has produced plenty of more potential points of degradation and failure, from a bulldozer slicing a cable in the countryside to a misconfigured firewall tool clamping down on business critical network traffic through the information centre.

Our customers tell us there's main reasons why they fail to update their network performance monitoring tools; either the IT team doesn't have the resources to oversee an upgrade project (not to mention manage the reports the tools will generate), or they have no budget. Let's address each objection in turn.

Lack of bandwidth:

However, more complex networks don't must translate in to more complex reporting. Performance management systems have come leaps and bounds in recent years and tools are now obtainable which have not only evolved technologically but are much more intuitive and simple to make use of. So, the specific document necessary in the above customer example can now be created instantly and automated using a brand spanking new advanced performance management method. The latest expertise can scale from the smallest to the largest networks and can be basically extended to monitor new tool types as they emerge on the market. Ubiquitous modern infrastructure parts, such as new routers, switches, access points and load balancers are automatically discovered as soon as they are added to the networks. With this level of visibility in to the whole network, the IT department must be able to view raw historic network performance, understand what is happening in actual time and make projections with detailed reports which can be generated in seconds than hours.

With plenty of IT departments overworked and understaffed, it is simple to understand the concern that upgrading network management application will take up management time they basically don't have. As networks have become more complicated, plenty of IT managers have found managing applications across networks has fragmented in to a sizable selection of monitoring product and expertise choices, and disparate processes. As a result, the reports they generate are becoming increasingly difficult to decipher and interpret. of our customers recently spent three weeks trying to generate a specific document using a legacy network performance management application. After months of frantic hair-pulling, they gave up and at last resorted to making a document himself by hacking their networking monitoring software's backend Oracle database and pulling the detail in to an Excel spreadsheet - a messy work-around which took another weeks and wasn't reusable.

Lack of budget:

So what about the cost argument? In the current 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 business doesn't have visibility in to the profiles of applications which are consuming bandwidth in their surroundings, how do they assure their availability, and guarantee their performance over the network?

The network is now the foundation of any IT infrastructure. It doesn't matter how nice your applications are, whether you virtualise your information centre, or you have the most powerful servers in the world running your information centre. If those applications or their individual parts cannot communicate with each other or their servers cannot communicate with each other or with backend databases, the application basically won't work - no matter how powerful or expensive it might be. In a nutshell, if the network is not running effectively all this great expertise is basically a wasted investment.

Saving funds by not updating network monitoring application is a false economy. The only alternative for those organisations with poor visibility in to their infrastructure is to blindly throw people, time and resources at an IT issue in the hope it will go away. Trying to troubleshoot a performance issue without the right tools steals productivity from IT and business users similar.

Years ago network monitoring was a giant investment which would often take years before any return was realised by which time the expertise had moved on. Today it is a different story; network performance management systems can be significantly less expensive and can deliver demonstrable value  immediately. years ago network performance might have been seen as an IT department issue but today, clients also require open access to network performance information to monitor service level agreements and provide better customer support.

Comprehensive network performance management is no longer a luxury but a business necessity. Modern expertise is not only able to limitless scalability, managing every single network element - it is also affordable and simple to make use of, even for users who are not network management specialists. When faced with the facts, the arguments that network performance management is expensive or time consuming don't wash any longer.

SevOne provides a speedy, simple, and scalable network appliance that combines granular performance information from NetFlow, SNMP, VoIP, IP SLA, NBAR and WMI in to a single view. This allows IT staff to lower their total cost of possession, assure service levels and increase productivity. For more information go to http://www.sevone.com