In the fast-paced era of modern communications, staying on top of network operations is critical to ensuring optimal performance and minimizing downtimes. While networks become increasingly complex, just keeping the lights on and reacting to issues as they arise is no longer enough. Today’s network management demands not only real-time monitoring but also the ability to derive insights from comprehensive reports to provide an accurate picture of health, performance, and configuration.

In today’s rapidly evolving networking landscape, enterprise networks are more complex than ever before. Network organizations must manage traditional Layer 2 networks while adopting cutting-edge software-defined technologies such as SD-WAN, SDDC, and SD-LAN. Managing these globally distributed, multi-dimensional networks is no small feat.

Network operations teams face challenges in managing modern, multi-vendor networks due to the need to collect and analyze data from various sources. Teams need to work with logs, events, and metrics, and this data is often scattered across different tools and locations. This fragmentation leads to inefficiency and complexity, as operators must switch between tools and interfaces to troubleshoot issues.

One thing most IT and network operations teams continue to contend with is more: more technologies, more vendors, more devices, and more complexity. Given these realities, its vital for network operations teams to minimize operational overhead wherever and whenever possible.

In today's interconnected world, ensuring network reliability and performance is not just important—it's a must. Network alarms serve as the first line of defense in identifying and mitigating potential issues, providing network operations teams with the actionable insights they need to respond swiftly and effectively. To truly empower network operations teams to boost agility and efficiency, these alarms must be real-time and actionable.

Microservices architecture has become a dominant approach for building scalable, resilient, and flexible applications. However, monitoring these microservices presents unique challenges due to their distributed nature, fixed or limited resources, enterprise scale, and the dynamic nature of environments, such as Kubernetes clusters. The result is that in-process application agents often introduce significant overhead because they rely on intrusive instrumentation and frequent polling.

The performance monitoring industry has been using the word “observability” to a lot of different ends lately. While the trend towards more visibility into services is a good one, it’s also based on a need we see from customers on a day-to-day basis. The need to take back control of network visibility is strong in the face of complexity that has been rapidly increasing for years.

SD-WAN has revolutionized how organizations optimize network performance and enhance connectivity across geographically dispersed locations. However, to fully capitalize on the benefits of SD-WAN, it is crucial organizations implement robust operational and monitoring practices. This is especially important given the growing operational and security challenges associated with the rising popularity of cloud-based services and SaaS applications.