Businesses in today’s world use networks for almost all their operations. As businesses grow and expand with time, so do their needs. As a result, their networks can become increasingly complex and sophisticated. This can result in network administrators having a harder time monitoring devices and identifying faults. These bottlenecks can be circumvented with network visualization.

The brutal reality is that ineffective monitoring invites trouble. Monitoring is your infrastructure’s eyes and ears. Ineffective monitoring is like driving with a wrong glasses prescription: you can’t see clearly, so it’s hard avoid current and future hazards.

A cynical network engineer might say, “configuration drift happens when you take the day off.” Someone changed something they shouldn’t have, and didn’t tell anyone. As a result, the network gets just a little less secure, and a little harder to troubleshoot. And then it happens again. And again. And over time, all those little changes that people thought would never mean anything suddenly add up to a network looking a lot different from what it’s supposed to be.

When I’m speaking to any IT solution provider or managed service provider (MSP), one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “What’s the one mistake you’d recommend any IT businesses avoid?” My answer is always this: Not documenting your business. The reason is simple. If you don’t document your business, you’ll inevitably find your business is prone to an SPF—a single point of failure.

When someone says a website is available, they mean that they can access that website. The application they’re trying to reach is up and working properly. High availability means that the website is up most of the time throughout the year. Companies can even put a percentage on this, striving for 100% availability, but typically getting somewhere a bit less, such as 99.9% or 99.99%.

As time progresses and competition grows, being “good enough” means that you may be falling behind. Engineers will discover new ways to solve problems, which will enable rapid increases in availability and scalability. With these increases comes more complexity and the generation of more data. Rather than just monitoring the new data and letting the old data sit there collecting dust, you should consider using it to gain maximum insights into your environment.

Consul is a service networking platform from HashiCorp that helps you manage and secure communication between microservices. You can use Consul with Kubernetes, and it supports on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud architectures. Consul service mesh provides a control plane which allows you to automate the management of traffic between your services via features like service discovery, DNS, load balancing, and routing.