Companies today are bombarded with information. At the same time, networks are becoming more complex. Your business likely deploys more software than ever before, and you containerize your workflows. Additionally, IoT devices generate more traffic, applications span more geographic regions, and you manage data from more vendors than ever.
This complex network environment and data overload create new challenges for digitally-driven businesses. Managing and extracting meaning from network data is one challenge, acting on the intelligence it provides is another. Especially since this information is often spread across multiple network monitoring tools.
Network monitoring tools provide some insight, but no single tool was designed for the volume of information available today. Few network monitoring tools can handle today’s large data streams. This is especially true for networks that are not just hardware-based.
Network monitoring tools may have cut it a few years ago. However, they’re no match for the influx of network data and complexity your business faces today. It’s time to graduate to something better: network observability.
What is network observability?
Network observability goes a step further than traditional network monitoring. Achieving network observability enables your business to use, ingest, and analyze the vast amounts of data generated across your network and then act on it in a way that improves performance and reduces disruptions.
Network observability vs. monitoring
Most IT teams are already familiar with network monitoring. Network monitoring is a process that identifies when something is broken, and notifies support staff that corrective action needs to be taken. It continues to be a primary component in good network management. But the shift toward cloud and more complex services means that traditional monitoring systems don’t translate data to intelligence, or intelligence to action.
Network observability does. Network observability provides information about the internal state of your system, avoiding red herrings and learning as it goes. It learns to identify the true cause of an anomaly or malfunction anywhere on your network, even before it takes place.
Network observability looks at network and system behaviors and predicts their outcomes. Best of all, network observability gives you actionable insights when less-than-optimal performance occurs somewhere on the network.
Network monitoring is inherently a reactive process. It checks a device or service and if it is down or not working well, IT must fix the issue.
Network observability moves IT to a proactive state. The system takes multiple sources of data and correlates them with logs, streaming data, APIs, event-based data, and a host of other inputs to provide a true proactive picture of how your network and your services are operating. Using AI, it understands the entire environment and provides meaningful, immediate information and fixes when things go wrong.
Network visibility vs. observability
In addition to network monitoring and observability, some vendors sell what they call “network visibility” tools. Network visibility tools, as their name implies, help organizations see the data. However, they do not tell you what to do with it. Network visibility tools will tell you key pieces of network data, network observability tools will allow you to use this data to improve your network.
Why implement network observability?
Consider an all-too-common scenario:
There’s an outage and your IT group is doing a lot of finger-pointing. The network, infrastructure, and security teams all put the blame somewhere else. However, in reality, no one truly knows where the fault occurred.
An IT organization can find itself firefighting for several reasons. The team might have some visibility tools that do not give enough insight. As a result, IT must depend on end users to report problems. The department may have a variety of tools but the alert cycle – from receiving an alert to checking it to correlating it across multiple systems to figuring out what the alert is trying to tell you – is still too slow to enable more proactive actions.
In both scenarios, the result is continued complaints and little progress in resolving issues before they impact network performance or the user experience. And with traditional polling occurring at timed intervals, you need to catch things at the right time to have any hope of acting on them before the calls start coming in.
With the larger range of things to monitor, you need a way to turn all those data streams into useful information. You’re receiving telemetry data, data from the end user, the branch, the data center infrastructure, the Cloud, Kubernetes, and containers. Human oversight over so much information isn’t possible. This is particularly true as businesses scale their use of cloud and edge services.
With many alerting platforms providing little information about the initial issue, IT must spend time tracking down the details before reaching any kind of resolution. This pushes mean time to repair (MTTR) out further and consumes more internal resources.
Benefits of network observability
But what if this team had network observability instead? A network observability tool would help identify what the alert really means.
Here are the questions the network observability platform would be able to answer:
- Is the device down or is the link experiencing local trouble?
- Is the upstream hardware or software tied to connection issues?
- Is it a carrier-side disruption?
- Is it an application error?
- Is there an issue in the data center?
- Is the overlay working properly?
- Could it be the connection to the end device causing the issue?
Faced with the same scenario outlined above, network observability will eliminate the issue from step one. There will be no need for finger-pointing because the tool will conduct a root cause analysis and tell you exactly where the issue originates. In fact, with the right tool in place, the outage probably wouldn’t occur in the first place. The IT team would likely receive an alert about the issue before an outage occurred.
A good network observability tool will:
- Monitor the network experience end to end: By providing continuous visibility into network performance, network observability allows your organization to detect bottlenecks and enable optimal resource allocation.
- Take everything into account: All devices, locations, traffic patterns, performance metrics, user behavior, and other critical network elements should be accessible and actionable.
- Learn: Aside from providing a real-time, holistic view of your network, a network observability tool will use historical data to predict trends and prepare for future network requirements.
- Provide meaningful, immediate information: Network observability tools provide real-time insights, allowing for quicker issue identification and resolution.
- Be proactive: These tools are collecting and analyzing data trends, allowing organizations to anticipate and mitigate potential problems before they affect users.
- Boost your security posture: Observability tools empower faster responses by identifying unusual patterns of behavior that may indicate security threats.
Network observability tools
The right network observability solution transforms network complexity and data overload into insights and action. It shifts your business from reacting to planning ahead. It predicts problems before they happen and allows for smooth operations.
Zayo’s zInsights customer portal, available to all of our Managed Edge customers, ups the standard for network observability tools. Built on years of network data, Zayo’s intelligent network platform acts as the “brain” of zInsights and differentiates Zayo as a clear leader in the network observability space.
zInsights:
Offers uncompromised security. Understand the applications users are trying to access, see the largest threats posed by your network to your organization, and understand where incidents are occurring from a bird’s eye view or more granularly.
Provides comprehensive network observability. Our platform helps you understand your most common network incidents and key incident locations. This way, you can address network issues proactively before they become critical.
Cuts through the noise. The intelligent network platform, which powers zInsights, uses AIOps and machine learning to proactively and predictively manage your entire network of online devices. With zInsights, IT teams understand which alerts require immediate action.
Enables customers to avoid downtime and productivity loss. zInsights shows you how all of your network providers are performing – their uptime, your utilization of their circuits, and your bandwidth consumption. Easily ensure carriers meet SLAs and guide capacity planning and resource allocation with a deeper understanding of how you consume each provider’s network. Avoid the cost of network downtime, end-user dissatisfaction, and productivity loss.
Offers a custom network view. We’ve worked with our customers to understand the most valuable visibility features. We give customers multiple map view options. You can see sites with issues or tasks to be completed, what SD-WAN tunnels are being created across your network in real time, and more.
Tracks devices. Know exactly where your valuable, distributed IoT devices are at all times. zInsights tracks the exact location of your devices and your data is always safe on our network.
Uses decades of historical data to provide market-leading insight. We’ve collected network data for twenty years and have trained our AIOps platform to run zInsights using that data. Our competitors don’t have the years of experience to build the model we’ve created.
Provides detailed health reporting. Our reports give comprehensive answers to your network questions. This way, you can share deeper insights across your organization and understand what’s happening to each element of your network.
Offers uncompromised security. Understand the applications users are trying to access, see the largest threats posed by your network to your organization, and understand where incidents are occurring from a bird’s eye view or more granularly.