FEATURE: NETWORK MONITORING
How will an effective network
monitoring system help CIOs explain
how the network is performing?
Pankaj Prasad, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner
for IT operations (AIOps) platforms.
ECA enables aggregation of alerts
and events from multiple sources into
a single tool, allowing for correlation
across similar events, including drill-
down capability for further investigation.
AIOps platforms are very recent on the
scene and enable ingestion of various
data-types (structured and unstructured
text, metrics etc.) at scale. These
platforms can further apply analytics to
the ingested data for root cause analysis
and to surface hidden anomalies
through the use of pattern recognition
and machine learning.
What are the consequences of
an ineffective network
monitoring system?
End users can expect a three-pronged
challenge due to an ineffective network
monitoring system:
• Lack of visibility to performance
of IT, which in turn creates gaps
for identifying business risks and
opportunities. The impact is
highest especially with customer-
facing systems
www.intelligentcio.com
“From a CIO
perspective,
visibility to
overall services
is crucial as
opposed to
performance
of individual
components
or network
elements.”
• Gaps in visibility inhibit the ability
of IT operations teams to identify
and troubleshoot issues quickly. Such
delays are detrimental to the overall
experience for all IT consumers within
and even outside an organisation
• Risk of non-adherence to regulatory
requirements
From a CIO perspective, visibility to
overall services is crucial as opposed to
performance of individual components
or network elements. With a good and
well-configured network monitoring
system, for example an NPMD solution,
the CIO can extract insights related to
latencies across applications as well
as gain valuable insight into real user
experience. These two aspects can
provide crucial insights related to risks
and opportunities which have a direct
impact on business in a digitised world:
• From an internal organisation
perspective – how can overall
application performance be
improved?
• Focus on applications, network
elements or infrastructure elements.
In short, identify areas for
improvement
• From an external, business perspective
– Is our customer facing any poor
performance at any given point
in time? Are there any positive or
negative trends in terms of user
experience based on time of day? Can
we improve user experience and make
it consistent throughout the day?
Data from network monitoring
becomes more valuable when
combined with data from other sources
like APM and ITIM tools, with an
overlay of analytics. A CIO can gain
visibility into business transactions
which transforms IT from being viewed
as a cost centre working in a reactive
manner towards being transformed as
a business partner. In short, a CIO can
now provide real-time inputs regarding
impacts to business as a result of
network and IT performance (which is
the ultimate goal of IT). n
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