Reasons Why Business Need To Monitor Their Networks

Networks become more difficult. A network must provide a growing range of services, from ERP, CRM, and email to VoIP applications and web services, each with its peculiarities and requirements. Each new service introduced to the network competes for available resources with all other services, affecting the network's ability to support the business.

Meanwhile, the network itself is continually evolving. New locations are added, some of which may be in another country or on another continent. The equipment is updated and reconfigured. The new administration and security tools can influence service performance. Decisions about consolidation and reorganization of data centers also affect the network in different ways. All of this makes the system a highly dynamic environment, where even subtle changes can have a significant and unexpected impact on application performance and availability.

However, business users expect this complex environment to be as reliable as electricity, even if network budgets don't increase in proportion to these growing challenges. As a result, network administrators cannot simply over-provision the network infrastructure to ensure that each service has all the bandwidth it needs. Also, oversupply may not even solve the problem and guarantee the required level of performance.

This is why network administrators face many challenges, including:

1) Identify potential network performance issues early in the development lifecycle

Ideally, the impact of the network on a new application or service should be addressed early in the development process, when potential problems are much more comfortable and less costly to solve. Unfortunately, this is generally not the case. Issues related to the “network capacity” of an application are usually not discovered until after deployment has started in the production environment. At this point, it is often too late to make significant changes to the design of the application. The problem is, therefore, on the shoulders of the network team. This is why, in 2005, administrators of intelligent networks will focus on solving these problems at the root.

2) Validate new or modified applications and infrastructures before being deployed in production

As the network becomes more complex and essential to the day-to-day operations of the business, the risks to network performance associated with changing applications and infrastructure continue to increase. Some of the worst business disruptions that companies have experienced historically were not the result of an unexpected equipment failure. They were the unforeseen consequence of a planned change. Therefore, network teams should implement best change management practices in 2005 so that they do not have to put out fires that accidentally start.

3) Improved troubleshooting of intermittent/transient network problems

One of the most frustrating things for a network administrator is to manage an issue that continues to disappear before it can be adequately understood and resolved. However, as the company's tolerance for network outages continues to decrease, these intermittent issues will become a more significant management issue. This year, network management teams must develop more efficient methods to capture transient network conditions and discover the root causes of these problems.

4) Accelerated balance time for new and updated applications

When C-level leaders decide to invest in new applications and services, they want these investments to be quickly rewarded. That is why the slow and staggering production implementations of the past will no longer suffice. Instead, network teams need to deploy new applications across the enterprise quickly. This can only happen if caution and uncertainty about the actual behavior of these applications in the production environment are replaced by confidence and certainty in 2005.

5) Smarter planning and support for business growth.

Network administrators are always faced with change. They need to determine how increasing network usage will affect application performance. They must decide how best to design the network to support business expansion, reorganization, or mergers and acquisitions. However, they can only do so if they have an effective way to perform capacity planning tasks and assess a full range of simulation scenarios. These scenarios are also essential for the formulation of realistic emergency plans that can guarantee business continuity under various possible conditions.

In light of these challenges, it quickly becomes apparent that conventional production network management tools are no longer sufficient for today's network teams. These tools are excellent for monitoring the production network and detecting certain types of problems. Still, they do not allow network administrators to validate new technologies and applications before their deployment on the production network. They also force network administrators to resolve issues that should have been resolved during the design of the use.

Conventional tools are also not very useful for solving intermittent and transient network problems, as they do not provide a way to reconstruct and analyze these sporadic conditions. They also do not help to speed up the implementation of production, to facilitate the testing of hypothetical scenarios or to support the formulation of network emergency plans.

So what should an overworked and under-resourced network administrator do? The answer is to look at network modeling technologies. These technologies provide an environment in which new applications, techniques, and troubleshooting strategies can be safely and thoroughly evaluated. Because they allow you to fully validate the network behavior of an application before it is deployed in the production environment, these technologies also enable network administrators to run deployments more quickly and smoothly. Additionally, modeling technologies are particularly capable of providing information on any number of simulation scenarios so that network administrators can plan plans for growth, business restructuring, and post-disaster recovery.

"Empirical" modeling solutions provide today's network management teams with particularly excellent business value due to their precision and ease of implementation. This precision and ease is achieved by running real applications on a model that uses the conditions captured in the production environment. The result is a clear understanding of the user experience long before deployment.

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