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Introduction
As enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journeys, the network underpinning digital success has become more complex and business-critical than ever before. However, inadequate visibility and intelligence around network performance frequently impedes digital progress and threatens availability. This underscores the imperative for modern network performance monitoring (NPM) solutions offering comprehensive visibility, actionable insights, and intelligent automation.
This blog post examines why elevating NPM practices is now essential. We explore what NPM entails, delve into crucial capabilities, outline best practices, discuss advanced use cases, and identify core challenges and mitigation strategies. Equipped with these insights, IT leaders can chart an NPM pathway aligned to their digital ambitions in 2024.
Network Performance Monitoring Overview
Network performance monitoring involves continuously tracking, analyzing, and managing network bandwidth utilization, traffic flows, device health, and other telemetry to ensure optimal efficiency, reliability, security, and alignment to business requirements.
Traditional NPM relied heavily on protocols like SNMP for device polling and NetFlow for traffic analysis. However, modern solutions are purpose-built for cloud scale and complexity. They combine real-time packet inspection with machine learning to contextualize device interactions, detect anomalies, forecast utilization, and even prescribe corrective actions based on intent. These intelligent capabilities allow IT teams to elevate NPM practices amidst rapidly evolving infrastructure and applications.
The Growing Importance of NPM
Maintaining peak network performance has become imperative for several key reasons:
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Ensuring application availability and reliability: With digital experiences increasingly driving customer acquisition and loyalty, the network underpinning applications can no longer be an afterthought. Proactive monitoring helps minimize disruptive outages.
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Driving employee productivity: Enterprise networks support vital collaboration tools and business systems. Optimization and problem remediation helps employees stay consistently productive.
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Unlocking digital innovation: Emerging technologies like AI, IoT, AR/VR require robust, high-performing connectivity. NPM aids capacity planning and infrastructure upgrades.
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Improving cost efficiency: Intelligent monitoring helps teams right-size investments, avoid overprovisioning, and prioritize upgrades based on actual – not perceived – necessity.
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Informing business forecasting: By exposing hidden network constraints through detailed traffic analysis, NPM allows data-driven decisions aligned to digital growth forecasts.
These reasons spotlight why high-performing networks are now a competitive differentiator, making NPM foundational.
Importantly, multiple technology trends further escalate the necessity of performance monitoring:
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IoT proliferation: Billions of connected devices are flooding networks with sensor data needing reliable transport.
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Rising mobility: Remote work mandates optimizing connectivity across home offices and public networks.
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New applications: AR, VR, video analytics and other emerging apps introduce more strenuous network demands.
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Multi-cloud adoption: Consistent monitoring gets complicated across hybrid domains with distinct characteristics.
These trends underscore why holistic network visibility, forecasting, and optimization enabled by NPM is now an operational and strategic imperative.
How Network Performance Monitoring Works
Modern network performance monitoring solutions typically utilize the following core approaches:
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Continuous data ingestion: NPM software continuously aggregates network device statuses, events, traffic flows, packets, and other telemetry from across the infrastructure.
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Advanced analytics: Leveraging big data pipelines and machine learning algorithms, NPM solutions automatically contextualize interdependencies, model baseline behaviors, detect anomalies, and expose optimization opportunities.
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Intelligent alerting: Abnormal fluctuations in utilization, faults, or SLA breaches trigger automated alerts so teams can investigate root causes and undertake guided remediation.
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Customizable visualizations: Intuitive dashboards allow administrators to interactively filter and analyze performance metrics in real-time across varied lenses like applications, locations, protocols, devices, and users.
These integrated capabilities elevate NPM with enhanced intelligence, automation, and ease-of-use—critical amidst cloud scale and complexity.
Typical NPM architecture encompassing data collection, warehousing, analytics and decision support
When exploring solutions, key architectural considerations include:
- Data collection via perpetual polling, flow analysis or streaming telemetry from infrastructure.
- Data transport leveraging efficient mechanisms like gRPC/Protobuf, Kafka etc.
- Time series data storage in specialized databases like InfluxDB optimized for metrics.
- Computation engines like Spark enabling rapid analytics, ML and AI across data sets.
- Visualizations and alarms providing actionable insights into operators through dashboards and workflow integration.
Beyond capabilities, NPM success also relies on defined monitoring processes encompassing:
- Setting KPI thresholds based on application SLAs, traffic patterns and growth estimates.
- Validating benchmarks through periodic reviews and benchmarking for continuous improvement.
- Assigning monitoring duties across NOC and SOC teams for 24×7 coverage.
- Enabling closed-loop integration with ticketing and event management systems so issues automatically initiate response workflows.
Key Network Performance Metrics
Among the many indicators tracked, the following metrics provide crucial insights that guide troubleshooting, optimization, and capacity planning:
| Metric | Significance | Typical Thresholds |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth Utilization | Reveals saturation and constraints across network tiers, highlighting upgrade needs | 70-80% for LAN/WLAN 50% for WAN |
| Traffic Patterns | Show utilization by apps, locations, times etc. allowing precise targeting of enhancements | As per application SLAs |
| Latency | Reflects network responsiveness backing reliable digital experiences | <50ms for VoIP <250ms for VDI |
| Jitter | Variability in packet transfer timing causing app glitches | <30ms for video apps <60ms for voice |
| Packet Loss | Signals transmission errors warranting infrastructure fixes | <2% for voice apps <5% for video streaming |
| Device Health | Ensures infrastructure faults get addressed before impacting network availability | CPU<90%, Disk<80% utilized |
Analyzing metrics in correlation provides a holistic perspective for root cause diagnosis and strategic decision making.
NPM Solution Capabilities
As network environments scale in size and complexity, NPM solution capabilities must keep pace. Key features enabling effective monitoring include:
- Agentless data collection: Eliminates deployment overhead while providing device deep-dives.
- Smart anomaly detection: ML rapidly exposes abnormal events misaligned to dynamic baselines.
- Analytics acceleration: GPU/FPGA-powered data pipelines rapidly contextualize billions of data points using AI/ML.
- Predictive forecasting: Statistical techniques estimate directional trends helping teams get ahead of issues.
- Intent-based guidance: Prescriptive recommendations enhance efficiency of problem diagnosis and troubleshooting.
- Automated remediation: Based on codified runbooks, solutions trigger pre-approved actions like microsegmentation to rapidly mitigate problems.
- Holistic observability: Tight integrations with APM, infra monitoring and logs provide interconnected insights spanning apps, networks, systems and businesses.
Advancing NPM practices demands leveraging such intelligence and automation to address visibility gaps, alert deluge, and expertise barriers amidst cloud scale.
When researching solutions, ensure capabilities align to use case complexity:
| NPM Requirements | Basic | Intermediate | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|
| IT Environment | Single site, static infrastructure | Multi-site hybrid infrastructure | Highly dynamic hybrid multi-cloud |
| Network Size | <10 devices, <5 apps | <100 devices, <50 apps | 1000+ devices, 100+ apps |
| Use Cases | Fault monitoring, basic reporting | Diagnostics, optimization, planning | Automation, predictive analytics, closed-loop remediation |
| Analytics Sophistication | Rules-based thresholds and alerts | Statistical baseline modeling and anomaly detection | Machine learning based forecasting, intent-based analysis |
| Solution Deployment | On-prem network analytics appliance | Hybrid combination of on-prem and SaaS | Cloud-native SaaS with unified data pipeline |
| Commercials | Lower TCO but less flexible. Perpetual licensing. | Balance across metrics. Subscription pricing. | Higher ROI from automation and efficiencies. Pure SaaS consumption pricing. |
Best Practices for Effective NPM
Beyond solution capabilities, success requires upholding critical best practices:
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Pervasive visibility: Monitor across the entire hybrid infrastructure encompassing core, distribution, access layers, WAN edges, cloud VPCs, and SaaS networks.
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Cloud-ready data collection: Support massively distributed and ephemeral cloud environments with agentless ingestion protocols like eBPF, INT, and gRPC.
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Baselining: Create traffic profiles capturing approved patterns, device behaviors, and flux zones to minimize false positives.
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Anomaly contextualization: Rapidly distinguish malicious threats from genuine anomalies using AI/ML techniques.
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Proactive planning: Leverage predictive utilization forecasts, what-if analysis, and simulations for informed capacity planning.
Upholding these practices is essential amidst modern network dynamism and flux to avoid losing visibility and control.
Additional leading practices include:
- Seeking unified visibility and analytics spanning network, application and security domains
- Ensuring strong foundational monitoring before pursuing advanced use cases
- Investing in skills and expertise to translate operational data into strategic business insights
Integrations and Use Cases
As networks become increasingly complex and business critical, NPM is evolving from an operations focus towards enabling larger digital success strategies through tighter integration:
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AIOps platforms: Integrations with algorithmic IT operations systems allow applying advanced analytics and automation across hybrid domains for accelerated insight to action.
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Observability tools: Tapping into application performance, infrastructure, logs and other data streams provides interconnected views spanning networks, apps, systems, security and businesses.
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Security analytics: Combining NPM with threat intelligence, behavioral analysis and endpoint telemetry amplifies threat detection, investigation workflows, and compliance oversight.
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DevOps automation: Programmatically interfacing with CI/CD pipelines and IaC solutions brings consistency across network, application, and security operations.
As an example, leading banking institutions are leveraging NPM in conjunction with AIOps to enable new digital banking capabilities:
- Granular visibility into network health and application traffic empowers safe rollout of services like mobile check deposit needing reliable connectivity.
- Machine learning rapidly detects anomalies signaling potential fraud activity across channels.
- Closed-loop integration with security systems contain threats before escalation.
- Capacity forecasting guides strategic planning for pop-up site expansions.
The integration of NPM with observability, security, automation and intelligence disciplines will further accelerate as infrastructure and applications converge.
Addressing NPM Challenges
However, adapting NPM for the cloud era has not been without challenges:
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Hybrid visibility gaps: Rapid technology churn limits legacy tools designed for static on-prem data centers.
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Alert fatigue: Dynamic environments trigger excessive alarms lacking appropriate context.
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Inadequate automation: Manual processes fail to keep pace with infrastructure scale and fluidity.
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Expertise scarcity: Specialized networking skills are hard to hire and retain amid talent shortages.
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Budget constraints: Legacy tools carrying perpetual licensing and hardware costs constrain innovation.
Mitigating these requires:
- Seeking unified cloud-native visibility, analytics and automation.
- Investing in AIOps, advanced analytics and machine learning to cut through complexity.
- Cultivating complementary skill sets across networks, systems, security and applications.
- Transitioning from CapEx to consumption-based pricing allowing flexibility.
Additionally, developing strong in-house NOC/SOC capabilities boosted by managed network monitoring services can help overcome resourcing and skill gaps cost effectively.
Revamping approaches, teams and systems collectively enables uplifting NPM for the digital age. But it requires upfront planning and investment justification.
According to IDC, the typical ROI derived from network management systems comes from:
- Risk mitigation: Avoiding 50% of outages translating to over $100,000 savings
- Productivity gains: Improving IT efficiency by 30% via automation
- Cost optimization: Right sizing bandwidth by 20% based on usage analytics
For a 5000 employee organization, this can conservatively amount to around $850,000 in benefits over 3 years versus deployment costs of $275,000 – translating to a compelling 306% ROI.
Building compelling business cases based on total cost of ownership, risk mitigation and productivity gains is key to securing executive support for a network management upgrade.
Conclusion
As digitalization accelerates, network performance has become integral for competitive differentiation. However, complexity, scale and skills gaps frequently impede progress. By embracing modern monitoring solutions with integrated telemetry collection, advanced analytics and automation, IT teams can systematically uplift NPM practices to the next level. This evolution from reactive troubleshooting towards data-driven optimization, planning and innovation will be central to digital strategies in 2024 and beyond.
With the visibility, intelligence and integration provided by contemporary network performance management platforms, enterprises can confidently accelerate their application modernization and cloud transformation initiatives knowing the network will be an enabler, not inhibitor, to powering digital business success.