Executive summary
Enterprise networks are continuously growing in scale and sophistication, spotlighting the deficiencies of legacy network monitoring tools. These tools were historically effective but are no longer capable of meeting today’s demands. Specifically, they struggle to cover complex network architectures with dynamic components and generate actionable data that extends beyond elementary metrics, such as uptime.
Against the backdrop of a data-driven world, a potent threat landscape, and evolving network architectures, businesses need more than visibility. They need observability.
Network observability solutions include proactive incident response, AI- and ML-based anomaly detection, interconnected and contextual mapping, real-time data analytics, and a broad range of telemetry sources.
This buyer’s guide will outline how to evaluate the ROI of contemporary network observability tools and traditional monitoring systems. We’ll zero in on key network observability metrics and illustrate how Site24x7 can help you maximize network observability ROI.
Why traditional network monitoring needs to evolve
To understand the importance of advanced network observability solutions, enterprises need to understand the converging trends, forces, and factors that expedited the end of legacy monitoring tools.
Enterprise IT environments have evolved from static and rigid setups with clearly delineated perimeters to architectures comprising dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral resources. Legacy tools simply weren’t designed with these environments in mind, so continuing to use them can result in performance and security degradation, as well as a complete lack of visibility or control.
Furthermore, businesses are more heavily reliant on their IT networks for mission-critical operations and processes. In a world where the slightest network issue can directly impact critical processes or compromise sensitive data, legacy network monitoring tools pose an immense risk. Cyberattacks and evolving regulations also make maintaining a healthy compliance posture challenging.
When legacy monitoring tools fail to detect anomalies, companies can face security and compliance disasters—and, ultimately, business failure.
Having established the broader context of why traditional network monitoring is unable to address contemporary demands, let’s examine a few specific limitations.
Reactive incident response
Legacy network monitoring tools were adept at alerting businesses to performance or security failures after the fact. Since legacy network monitoring focused on cures rather than prevention, finding the root cause of network issues and remediating them often involved lengthy and complex processes—with severe downstream business implications.
Given today’s competitive markets and evolving customer expectations, enterprises can’t afford to only be reactive.
Suboptimal visibility
Older network monitoring tools were built to measure simple metrics like uptime, not create and track a complex topology of connectivity flows and traffic. Enterprise IT environments are increasingly evolving into a tangle of interconnected multi-vendor networks, cloud services, containerized applications, and ephemeral assets.
In this environment, legacy monitoring tools are guaranteed to spawn blind spots and generate network snapshots that lack depth and breadth.
Lack of real-time analytics
Since they lack a continuous flow of diverse telemetry data and mechanisms to contextualize and correlate findings, legacy monitoring tools severely stunt real-time analytical capabilities.
Without real-time analytics, businesses are almost always a step behind network incidents, struggling to catch and mitigate issues before they manifest as outages or performance declines.
Pre-defined thresholds
Legacy network monitoring tools function based on pre-established thresholds. For instance, you can set them up to alert if CPU utilization exceeds a certain level. The issue with pre-defined thresholds is that IT teams eventually have a long list of low-risk network issues to deal with, causing alert fatigue. Pre-defined thresholds also don’t leave any room for variables and contextual intricacies.
The above limitations make it clear that businesses need cutting-edge network observability platforms—not rudimentary monitoring tools.
The benefits of an advanced network observability solution
An advanced network observability solution is more than just a security or performance monitoring tool; it’s a strategic powerhouse. With their advanced insights, businesses gain deep visibility, control, and understanding of their network, as well as more actionable and strategic information.
Key advantages include enhanced transparency and traceability, better compliance, reinforced security, and high performance in productivity—all critical prerequisites for strategic success.
Below, we explore two specific benefits in broader detail.
Root cause analysis (RCA)
Advanced network observability tools are ideal for identifying the root cause of network inconsistencies and bugs. Troubleshooting also becomes streamlined since network observability tools provide an interconnected look at network topologies, giving incident responders clear direction on how to remediate issues.
Tools that leverage AI and ML can also study patterns in real time and preempt performance degradation or security issues, making the entire network management program proactive.
Risk detection
With the right network observability tools, businesses can detect security vulnerabilities like configuration drift before they escalate into incidents. Network observability platforms with a compliance component also help businesses adhere to regulations such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOX. Since applications comprise the majority of the enterprise attack surface, these solutions augment application monitoring mechanisms to unveil and remediate application issues.
Now that we have a grasp on the most important benefits a transformative network observability solution can provide, how can we measure these gains?
Key metrics to evaluate network observability ROI
As enterprises expand their network architecture, it’s paramount to examine ROI through a microscope. From an IT perspective, network observability ROI transcends the network, measuring the business and strategic value these tools provide.
Before diving into the features of ROI-maximizing tools, let’s discuss the KPIs and metrics required to evaluate ROI:
- Downtime: The amount of downtime and network disruptions that the network observability tools can save by proactively detecting and remediating problems
- RCA speed: How much time is needed to identify the underlying reasons behind network performance fluctuations or security issues
- Alerts: How proactive a business is in identifying network inconsistencies and complications before they result in service outages or poor end-user experience
- Total cost of ownership (TCO): The costs of implementing a new network observability solution, from implementation to decommission
Top network observability features for maximizing ROI
In this section, we’ll examine critical ROI-maximizing features and highlight how Site24x7 elevates them.
Full-stack visibility
Complete observability has a crucial prerequisite: comprehensive visibility across enterprise networks. This includes networks, business applications, data, and devices like routers, firewalls, WLCs, and switches.
By achieving complete network visibility, businesses solidify their foundation to drive value via strong, high-performing networks.
Site24x7 provides a comprehensive topology across even the most complex network architectures, comprising on-premises and cloud-based networks like VMware NSXs and Cisco Meraki. This clear view of activity, traffic, setups, configurations, devices, and data delivers full-stack visibility from a single pane, eradicating silos and unifying network management.
Topology visualization
A good observability tool shouldn’t just list networks, apps, and devices; it should show how they connect and interact across the entire network architecture. The goal isn’t to just see what exists in a network environment; it’s to understand both its inner workings and implications for the rest of your enterprise’s IT infrastructure.
Site24x7 creates a comprehensive topology of networks and traffic flows, streamlining issue resolution and supporting continuous monitoring and enterprise network optimization. Its console ensures a bird’s-eye view of their complete network architecture, while custom nodes can align topographic maps with specific business goals.
Distributed tracing
Contemporary microservices-heavy tech stacks are radically different from the monolithic models of the past, and network observability tools must correlate data from disparate sources. By doing so, these solutions can generate more accurate performance insights and accelerate the diagnosis and remediation of latency or throughput issues.
Site24x7 leverages highly advanced tracing mechanisms to track the entire lifecycle of a network transaction. It attaches an HTTP header with metadata to every API request, allowing users to map out the entire transaction’s journey.
Log collection and analysis
Logs are immensely useful in understanding the underlying health of enterprise networks. Top network observability tools have a centralized log management feature with AI-powered analysis to identify the cause of performance lulls, pinpoint points of failure, and uncover security or compliance errors.
Site24x7 provides a comprehensive suite of log management capabilities, including the ability to ingest, analyze, and derive actionable data from network devices. Compatible with more than 100 log types, you can also create specific log types to match your network management needs and leverage the platform’s dashboards, usage summaries, alerts, and tagging.
Performance assessments
Strong network observability tools should continuously and proactively assess network performance, cross-analyze current health with historical patterns, and evaluate where real-time network behaviors stand compared to established baselines and thresholds.
Optimal performance assessments ensure that performance fluctuations are swiftly and seamlessly mitigated.
Site24x7’s network assessments are a reflection of its ability to provide full-stack network visibility,with performance data visualized and woven into health dashboards, topology maps, and Layer-2 maps. Set up custom SNMP monitoring to establish performance thresholds, and export performance data via various reports, including Interface Availability Summary Reports, Availability Summary Reports, Health Trend Reports, and Top-N reports.
Traffic flow analysis
One of the best ways to assess the health of a network is to monitor how data flows through it. Top-of-the-line network observability tools perform AI-powered traffic flow analyses to identify performance bottlenecks, make sense of usage patterns, and red-flag security vulnerabilities.
Site24x7 offers in-depth insights via traffic flow analyses to identify and unclog bandwidth-hogging flows. This ensures that businesses optimize data flows and distribute bandwidth-intensive transactions without compromising network performance. Supplementary features include custom dashboards, DSCP templates for traffic tagging, and detailed traffic reports.
Configuration change tracking
In fast-changing and widely distributed network architectures, configuration drift can quietly cause big problems. That’s why the top network observability tools focus on continuously monitoring and staying on top of configuration changes.
Site24x7’s network configuration management capabilities enable businesses to monitor devices across their network architecture, assess compliance health, and automate configuration enforcement, updates, and backups. Any time there's a suspicious or unofficial configuration change, Site24x7 will alert you.
AI-powered anomaly detection
Instead of relying on static rules, network observability solutions leverage the powers of AI and ML to compare real-time data with past patterns, significantly improving anomaly detection, triage, and response. Another added benefit is reducing the number of false positives, which frees up employee bandwidth and cuts unnecessary remediation costs.
Site24x7 uses powerful ML algorithms to sift through vast volumes of live and historical data, constructing patterns, unveiling trends, and preempting performance drops. Its anomaly detection is completely automated, which means IT teams don’t have to spend precious hours manually surveilling enterprise networks. Human error—and its associated costs—is also minimized.
Service-level agreement (SLA) management
Every component of an enterprise network is bound by SLAs between the business and its vendor. Network SLA management is a crucial and underappreciated part of optimizing network management.
enhances and elevates SLA management to drive business outcomes and value. For instance, if an SLA with a certain service provider establishes minimum requirements for uptime, downtime, response times, and availability, the platform provides all the visibility and monitoring capabilities required to ensure adherence to those benchmarks.
Cloud efficiency management
As the adoption of cloud services skyrockets, enterprises need to continuously and proactively improve performance while reducing costs. The best network observability platforms provide comprehensive details about cloud consumption, resource utilization, security, and performance.
Site24x7 generates insights and correlates data to unveil hidden patterns and trends in cloud-based network usage. Businesses gain complete information on how well they’re utilizing cloud technologies and what changes they can make to tweak performance and cut costs. Over time, the financial and productivity gains from cloud optimization via Site24x7 can be profoundly transformative.
Summary
As network architectures become more complex, businesses need to replace legacy network monitoring tools and commission cutting-edge network observability solutions. The key to optimizing network management is to choose a platform that can boost ROI and provide measurable strategic and business value.
As highlighted in this buyer’s guide, Site24x7’s network observability features do exactly that.
With ROI-maximizing capabilities that range from full-stack coverage to cloud efficiency management, Site24x7 is the ultimate network observability and management solution, driving digital transformation initiatives and making enterprise networks robust, resilient, and focused on ROI. It also empowers and future-proofs IT teams by helping them transition from reactive monitoring to intelligent, outcome-driven network management.
Curious to see how Site24x7 can optimize ROI and keep your networks secure, streamlined, and high-performing? Request a personalized demo now.