India especially, through its recent colossal growth of IT enablement and cloud first ‘Digital India’ initiatives, has even greater requirements for proactive network monitoring practices.
India especially, through its recent colossal growth of IT enablement and cloud first ‘Digital India’ initiatives, has even greater requirements for proactive network monitoring practices as these cloud first initiatives are set against a backdrop of widespread internet outages
Ian Shearer, Managing Director, APAC & EMEA, Park Place Technologies.
Effective proactive network monitoring is a key consideration in supporting today’s modern networks which are increasingly dynamic, complex, and must facilitate the extraordinary growth of network data. To keep pace with all this additional traffic and device usage, today’s network admins require at-a-glance and in-depth discovery, monitoring, and optimisation, housed in a single interface in order to control their globally networked, cloud driven and remote estates. Only by utilising a singular control pane can admins realistically control and effectively monitor often thousands of devices, badged with hundreds of hardware makes and models. For end users, network monitoring can make the difference between a poor digital experience and a highly enabled one. India especially, through its recent colossal growth of IT enablement and cloud first ‘Digital India’ initiatives, has even greater requirements for proactive network monitoring practices as these cloud first initiatives are set against a backdrop of widespread internet outages, often effecting remote workers and remote offices. In cloud enabled environments, this places even greater pressures on comprehensive network monitoring.
Without such a holistic, centralised and ongoing monitoring approach, it can become impossible to effectively manage and predict performance, security and health issues. At worst unchecked, it can mean enterprises are left vulnerable, slow performing or worse, taken completely off-line. At best, using effective network monitoring solutions provides network admins with a centralised control hub to see where things are going wrong, or critically, where they may go wrong in the near term, and apply remediation fixes before issues can occur. But it’s a mistake to link network monitoring solely to troubleshooting. Detailed network monitoring is predictive, protective and highly performance-enhancing for devices and network data alike and allows for maximum uptime. It provides a constant gage on overall network health, with the precision capability to drill down to individual device level to isolate and fix problems far faster than through manual intervention checking inventory. Reducing the mean time to repair (MTTR) is a key KPI of every network manager to give business continuity and zero impact to the end user experience.
Of course, it all starts with a thorough up-to-date understanding and viewpoint of what’s running on the infrastructure. No longer can network admins use static ITAM listings compiled at regular intervals in the year to know what’s running on the estate and possibly causing an issue. Continual, automated discovery is now the expected norm to allow network admins to flag and find devices that may otherwise remain undetected and may go on to present wider security issues. Once ongoing discovery is in place, next comes monitoring. Traditionally, network admins used fault monitoring solutions to track failures, but modern network monitoring also incorporates speed and performance indicators as slow performance often indicates a likely near-term problem or device failure. Typically, an ongoing monitoring solution will flag server overloads, system crashes, sub optimally performing devices that need attention, and highlight that network connections are all running well. Reporting metrics are likely dashboard driven and usually divided into three pillars that include response times, availability status and uptime. Collecting and analysing such network data allows businesses to optimise business performance, meet and exceed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and provide a window on network health for overall IT planning.
We already mentioned the push to strongly digital innovation in the region and network monitoring also facilitates highly effective rollouts of new services, applications and onboarding of end-users. It achieves this by understanding and mapping critical dependencies before rollouts occur. This means that network managers can now forward plan alignment of new high business value applications with available infrastructures and identify situations of likely overload for new rollouts from the planning stages. Park Place Technologies empowers data centre teams to think bigger; view more; and optimise with confidence. Park Place provides network monitoring and management through their Entuity Software™ suite.
