Network Performance Monitoring

Observer provides comprehensive visibility and insight into critical IT resources, whether in the data center core, network edge, or cloud. Delivering network and application insight from the perspective of the end-user, Observer helps network and operations teams ensure maximum effectiveness of IT services through three critical use cases: 

• Managing new initiatives and daily operations
• Mitigating risk from planned and unexpected event 
• Solving performance and security issues

The network performance monitoring solution from VIAVI serves as the starting point for troubleshooting service anomalies, managing network resources, and aiding investigations of incidents of concern (IOC) or confirmed security breaches. From here, IT teams can quickly gain access to relevant application, network, infrastructure, and user operational metrics for a variety of critical network performance and network security scenarios.

• What is Network Performance Monitoring?

  Network performance monitoring solutions characterize and report on relevant metrics tied to IT services and supporting resources. They also provide troubleshooting for network, application, or security anomalies along with capabilities to optimize overall service delivery.

• Why is network performance monitoring complexity growing?

  The increasing network monitoring challenges are tied to emerging hybrid IT environment in general and cloud-hosted assets specifically along with resource abstractions like server virtualization and SDN. Applications are also becoming ever-more complicated as the number of tiers and their hosting location options proliferate.

• What are the largest challenges to troubleshooting network performance?

  According to the VIAVI Solutions State of the Network Global Study for 2018, over half of network professionals indicated the greatest challenge in troubleshooting performance was determining the problem cause. Essentially, when faced with performance issues, network teams don’t know where to begin troubleshooting – whether it’s the network, application, client, or system. These issues become more complex when managing network performance in cloud or remote environments.

• How can network performance monitoring solutions aid in troubleshooting?

  Problem remediation can be greatly accelerated by solutions that provide capture, analysis, and long-term storage of all packets, flows, conversations, and transactions. Retention of this critical information and advanced analytics allows IT teams to quickly browse backward through massive amounts of network traffic post-event to the specific time the episode occurred, whether tied to service issue or a security breach. No need to wait for the problem to reoccur. Once found, the anomaly can be viewed contextually with other activity as it occurred—think of it as an “always-on” video security system for your network.

• What capabilities are needed to quickly solve network performance problems?

  Three key capabilities feed into an effective network performance monitoring strategy. Troubleshooting success is built on visibility into every event and retention of all transactions and network conversations in the form of captured wire data. Missing events leads to flawed analysis and negates the value of the data for forensics.

  Network performance monitoring solutions require machine learning to proactively pinpoint and assess the impact of events on end-users and determine the scope and cause. When problems are reported, teams need out-of-the-box workflows that score the impact of issues on end-users, assist in navigating to the logical cause of the problem, and provide forensic evidence to fix the issue.

• How Can Network Performance Monitoring Aid Existing IT Security Initiatives?

  Comprehensive network performance monitoring solutions enhance security offering in-depth visibility into traffic traversing the network and underlying infrastructure that controls conversation flows. With this information, SecOps and NetOps teams can profile user and device activities, and then use this data to quickly detect and alert on possible rogue behavior. In addition, this information is valuable post-event to clean-up compromised assets and assess specifically what company intellectual material may have been compromised.