Network management can feel like an endless cycle of reactive problem-solving. But why has it become so complex, why are so many network alerts counter-productive, and what do enterprises need instead to cut through the noise and focus on the areas that genuinely need attention?
Picture this: it’s a busy Tuesday morning and staff are hard at work in the office, at home, and out in the field with customers. Suddenly the IT team’s phone lines light up, as stressed employees in other departments ring to say that the network is running slow and the applications and systems they need to do their jobs aren’t working properly.
The team scrambles to find out what’s happened to the network, but the information they need to find the root cause and fix it is difficult to track down among a deluge of network data – and senior management are furious because the business is losing money.
This is a scenario that many IT and network teams will be familiar with, and it’s not hard to see how it’s come about.
Enterprise networks are increasingly complex. Developments like the rise of cloud, more mobile and IoT devices, and remote working have changed the face of network architecture significantly in recent years. Nearly 56% of organizations now have more than 500 network devices, and 10% have more than 5,000.
This has made the job of network management much more difficult and resource intensive. At the same time, however, network uptime and performance have become absolutely fundamental to keeping the business running, piling more pressure on the network management team.
Too Many Undifferentiated Alerts Lead To Critical Mistakes
Network monitoring systems provide a wealth of information about the health, performance, capacity, and utilization levels of networks, components, and devices. They produce such large quantities of data that many teams are reliant on the alerts these monitoring systems generate to highlight areas of concern.
Alerts are notifications about network and device performance, problems, and downtime. They can include information ranging from configuration errors, to the network nearing maximum capacity limits, to full system outages.
They’re a vital component of network management, but because of the growing complexity of enterprise networks, the volume of alerts can be overwhelming. Many notifications are relatively unimportant, represent false positives, or contain inaccurate information.
This makes it difficult for network teams to work out which notifications genuinely need attention, and can even lead to alert fatigue and critical alerts being accidentally overlooked.
This has serious implications for both the network and for the wider business:
- Poor performance and outages: Critical alerts being missed can lead to performance problems or downtime, which prevents the organization from running properly and can mean lost revenue. According to Gartner, the cost of unplanned downtime is around $5,600 per minute.
- Slow response times: Out-of-control network alerts make it difficult for network teams to respond fast enough to the issues that need to be dealt with urgently.
- Reactive network management: 84% of organizations say users encounter issues before the network team know about them. Ineffective network alerts make it difficult to tackle problems in the early stages, before they start affecting the wider business.
- Taking up valuable resource: Working through this deluge of alerts to find the information needed to manage the network effectively takes up a significant amount of staff time, which could be better spent elsewhere.
What Should Enterprises Look for in a Network Monitoring Platform?
To address these challenges, enterprise network monitoring and alert platforms should provide:
AI-Driven Insights
Network monitoring services generate far too much data for humans to cope with. AI, on the other hand, can analyze and interpret vast quantities of data to:
- identify potential problems and anomalies
- find root causes
- provide essential context
- more effectively categorize alerts based on severity and business impact
- learn from historical patterns
- identify risks to future network health
Context
Context is essential for faster issue resolution. This might include clear and detailed information about the services, systems or devices affected, exactly what happened and when, and the causes or threshold triggers.
Related events, notifications, and diagnostics – either current or historical – help to provide a full overview and identify whether there is a longer-term problem at play.
Comprehensive Coverage and Customizable Views
A single pane of glass providing a comprehensive overview of all devices, components, connections, and sites helps IT teams pull together all the relevant information for the bigger picture behind network issues.
Instead of a purely device-centric view, network monitoring should also offer site-, application-, and service-oriented overviews. The ability to customize network views and to dial detail up and down as needed is also important. This allows IT teams to see the impact on users, sites, and the wider business, while still providing the granularity needed to identify the root causes of issues.
Better Network Monitoring and Insight Drives Higher Performance and Saves Time and Money
Stronger Alignment Between IT and Business Priorities
This approach to network management and alerting helps IT teams to orient their priorities with those of the wider organization.
Focusing on the impact on critical applications, locations, and users – rather than the performance of individual devices or connections – means incidents and alerts can be prioritized according to their effect on operations, employees, and revenue.
This also saves significant man-hours for higher-value activities, and helps to reduce the cost of network management.
Faster Issue Resolution and Less Downtime
Reducing unnecessary noise cuts down on alert fatigue and avoids critical alerts being missed, while contextual information provides crucial insight into root causes.
This means IT teams can more easily focus on the most important issues, allowing them to solve problems more quickly when they arise, or before they even begin causing trouble for users. This helps to improve network performance and reduces downtime.
Insights Drive Better Decision-Making and Scalability
Comprehensive and insightful network monitoring data allows the IT department to make better and more informed decisions, such as planning future capacity. It also makes network management more scalable, since adding new devices, sites, and connections doesn’t swamp the team with even more unnecessary alerts.
Orchestra Insight: Cutting Ticket Volumes by a Quarter
Orchestra Insight provides real-time analytics and AI-driven, actionable intelligence across all services and sites, along with contextualized monitoring, intelligent event correlation, and customizable dashboards – all through a single pane of glass.
It helps enterprise network teams cut through the noise of data, events, and notifications to focus on critical information, like network availability, risk and health, and the impact on users and application performance.
Orchestra Insight is highly customizable, providing every level of detail from broad overview to fine granularity to identify root causes and remediate issues before they become a problem for the business.
With Orchestra Insight, customers have experienced a 20% improvement in the auto-closure of tickets and an incredible 25% reduction in ticket volume.
Network Monitoring Platforms Have an Ongoing Role To Play in IT Strategy
Effective network monitoring and alerting helps IT teams to shift their focus away from reactive problem-solving to proactively managing the network for better performance and uptime. And as organizations grow and change, these platforms play an important role in mitigating network complexity and freeing the IT team to make enterprise infrastructure more effective at serving the goals of the business.