The Power of Two: Network and Application Visibility are Better Together

I bet you don’t need more than one hand to count the number of seconds that pass between the onset of an application or network performance issue and the arrival of the first IT helpdesk ticket . . . or irate phone call. However, identifying the exact cause of the service degradation often takes a little more time and effort. 

Cloud Comes with Complexity

As more enterprises move to a hybrid IT infrastructure to improve business and IT efficiencies, they also inherit new levels of complexity when it comes to identifying and remedying performance issues. When problems occur, users’ productivity levels fall while their impatience (and the pressure on your shoulders) rises. The key to minimizing business impact is establishing unified visibility into how applications interact with the network in order to assure service quality. This requires a detailed view of application dependencies interlaced with live performance intelligence into application and networked-infrastructure performance.

The enterprise is transforming into a mix of on-premises applications and cloud-based services, with core apps and data usually running on-premises in private datacenters and other apps running in the public cloud. Often there are critical dependencies between them automating business processes such as orders, inventory management or payroll. Users at branches connect to data center resources over private links, while connecting to SaaS (News - Alert) applications over the Internet.  So when we talk about a hybrid enterprise, it has not only to do with where applications are hosted, but also with how they are accessed.

Hybrid IT is not a fleeting trend that will disappear anytime soon. True, organizations are growing more comfortable with moving some information stores and applications to the cloud. However, the data center remains a critical component of the enterprise IT infrastructure because it provides IT with the control required for sensitive data and mission-critical systems. According to Gartner (News - Alert), nearly three-fourths of large enterprises expect to have hybrid deployments by the end of this year.

Networks, the pathways that form the enterprise’s nervous system, are a key leverage point in a hybrid architecture. Private networks (multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) links) are being joined by public networks (the Internet) to offer choice in delivery channels and cost efficiencies.  Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) allow enterprises to intelligently map their business objectives to their hybrid infrastructures. For example, an organization might map time-sensitive, mission-critical applications to higher quality and costly private networks, while mapping recreational, SaaS and bulk workloads like video to the less expensive and less reliable high bandwidth public networks.

As IT leaders are working to build these viable hybrid networks and environments, their companies are simultaneously experiencing a business transformation where application and network performance are essential to generating revenue, competing and maintaining customer relationships. A recent Enterprise Management Associates white paper reports that IT decision makers identify “ensuring network performance” as their number one data center challenge. The primary reasons for this emphasis are enterprises are using business-aligned service quality and application performance as key metrics of success for their network management teams.

Balancing these new business drivers with the inherent complexity is no simple task. Outages are still a common problem, and can hit unexpectedly. Why? Because it’s difficult to predict reliability and performance in a cloud environment—even with pre-deployment testing—as there are complex dependencies. You must prepare for failure.

Once you move applications to the cloud, you lose visibility unless you have the right tools to pinpoint exactly where bottlenecks or failures are occurring. The problem is often the network, but it could also be the application itself, something within the cloud provider's infrastructure, or maybe it’s just an issue that impacts a small set of users in a specific location.

While existing monitoring solutions can be combined with reports from cloud providers to provide some level of visibility, this piecemeal approach doesn’t always work. The solution is to create a single platform that provides the necessary visibility, optimization, and control across all on-premises and cloud deployments.

Barriers to Unified Visibility

This is easier said than done. A chief obstacle to realizing these improvements is the fact that teams use multiple monitoring tools, which adds complexity to performance management efforts. Add in the siloed nature of IT cultures, and teamwork becomes even more complex.

Over the last several years, the typical IT organization has necessarily evolved into a model that represents several isolated islands rather than one large team. Multiple functional teams manage separate technology stacks, including networks, servers and applications, using their own silos of monitoring tools. This makes troubleshooting problematic because each team tries to keep using its own tools for root-cause analysis. There is no shared collaborative data set that gives an end-to-end view of services, and the source of performance problems might not be immediately obvious to a siloed management tool because the root cause might have to do with the relationships between infrastructure layers rather than with one particular part of the infrastructure.

Cutting Through Complexity

Teamwork is critical for success.  Creating a generative culture focused on curiosity, teamwork, trust and continuous improvement is critical for building a high-velocity IT organization. Building an integrated performance portal can go a long way to developing a generative high-velocity culture that rapidly solves complex problems, and turns IT into a business enabler. 

Successfully integrated performance portals for hybrid environments provide:

• End-to-end performance maps of near real-time performance telemetry, enabling rapid data-driven decisions.
• Critical insights into internal and external KPIs focused on enabling effective identification, triaging, and resolution no matter where the problem resides.
• Drill-down workflows from dashboards, maps and KPIs enable workflow-based forensic analysis focused on high-fidelity root-cause analysis. 
• Details matter, so make sure you have rapid access to the network performance metrics, packets, hardware metrics, hypervisor metrics, operating system metrics, applications transactions, code/function metrics and more.  You never know where exactly an issue will crop up, or at what level of time granularity it will take place. 
• Open APIs for extensibility, customization and run book automation

Maintaining application performance is more critical to business success than ever before. The velocity of your business relies on you continuously improving performance and innovating. This requires you to continuously understand what is going on, optimize the system constraints, control quality, eliminate waste, aggressively innovate and to do it over and over again. Get started building your performance portal today.