Networks are becoming more complex every day. Enterprises employ hundreds, if not thousands, that depend on a stable, reliable network to get their work done in an effective manner. This puts a considerable amount of stress on IT teams to not only have clear visibility into their infrastructure 24/7, but also to troubleshoot any emerging issues that could cost your business thousands in a matter of minutes. Considering the high cost of network downtimes, accurate network monitoring and visibility is paramount to any organization.
What is Network Visibility?
In layman terms, network visibility is simply knowledge or awareness of the activity and data within your network. Network visibility and monitoring solutions should provide a complete view of what is happening in their network. What applications are causing congestion, where there may be future bottlenecks, and much more. Armed with this knowledge, IT teams can be proactive when monitoring the network and be keenly aware of network performance, inefficiencies, applications, network resources, and traffic.
Why Network Visibility is Important
There are many reasons why comprehensive network visibility is vital. Scanning and optimizing the network for any bottlenecks or blind spots that may occur can give your organization a proactive view into future issues. Additionally, with proper network monitoring, you can be alerted to any performance changes, providing a clear picture of issues for IT teams to tackle before it can turn into a larger problem, such as prolonged network downtime.
End-to-End Network Visibility
End-to-end visibility refers to your network monitoring tool’s ability to see across and into different domains in the network for example DC, public cloud, WAN, and campus. Where the traffic has originated from, who and where is requesting it, where it’s going and the path it takes to get there. Considering how many devices and connections are going into your network, this can be extremely time-consuming and difficult to track or diagnose. If your network monitoring solution isn’t seeing end to end paths that the traffic takes, it may miss a crucial error.
Capacity Planning
Network Capacity Planning is ensuring that the network has been provisioned properly to meet business needs. Capacity planning is a key part of the network visibility plan and many enterprises follow scheduled reporting to ensure this critical information is analyzed on a regular basis. Without proper capacity planning, the network may be under provisioned and more bandwidth is needed to ensure smooth operations and responsive apps. However, one must be mindful of overprovisioning, which can cause an unnecessary waste of budget and time.
Network Visibility Benefits
Increased network visibility impacts nearly every aspect of your company and IT team, from troubleshooting to NOC monitoring. Thorough and routine optimization ultimately improved the performance of your network for employees and customers. Since there is no simple solution to determine what action may be needed to prevent an outage, having full awareness of your network is supremely important. Once an application is pushed live onto the network, it becomes increasingly more difficult to troubleshoot on the fly without total visibility. This can lead to unnecessary loss of productivity and a poor user experience. Whether you’re verifying bandwidth or load time on devices within the network, an incomplete picture of the network will drastically impact your work.
LiveAction Network Visibility Solutions
LiveAction allows companies to manage large and complex networks by unifying and simplifying the collection, correlation, and presentation of application and network data. Our easy-to-use interface allows teams to go from a global view and drill down to a location, a single hop, or even an individual packet. LiveAction’s solutions significantly improve troubleshooting MTTR for issues across network domains, segments, and geographies. Want to learn more about what LiveAction can do to give you clear visibility into your network? Contact us for a free live demo of our products from one of our expert engineers.