See It Before They Do: Why NetOps Teams Are Embracing Active Monitoring
This article is excerpted from Keysight's Geek-to-Guru Guide: Proactive Network Monitoring
Your network is more than an information delivery system. It’s the heartbeat of your business. Bottlenecks and service outages are more than annoyances; they spoil your users’ experience. And you know what that means: reduced revenue, delayed time to market, impaired productivity, and — worst of all — lost customer loyalty.
At the same time, sustaining your network is more difficult than ever. Active monitoring offers a well-established method to monitor user experience, but many in IT have seen it as more of a luxury than an essential tool. But that’s all changing. The shift to remote work has spurred a sea change in network deployment models. Scalable, cost-effective solutions such as SD-WAN, cloud, and virtualized infrastructure help address some of these challenges, but they also make networks more complex — and difficult to monitor.
Next-generation networks demand next-generation performance monitoring. That’s why so many enterprises are adding active monitoring solutions to their network tool stack. From its hybrid-friendly nature to the predictive insights it provides, here are some of the most important reasons network operations teams are making the switch.
See it before they do
Traditional performance monitoring tools are reactive. They alert you when network speeds fall short, which is helpful for understanding if your equipment needs upgrading or if signal conditions are causing performance degradation. But by the time passive monitoring tools detect a problem, your customers are already frustrated — and potentially evaluating the competition.
When the quality of your customer experience can make or break your business, you need to get ahead of issues to maintain quality of service (QoS). That’s why network operations teams are embracing a more proactive approach. With active monitoring, it’s easy to detect, diagnose, and remediate issues before they impact your end users and cause costly service interruptions.
Monitor distributed networks with ease
Network perimeters are vanishing. SD-WAN, cloud, and edge computing are replacing the clearly defined corporate data centers of the past. These technologies offer considerable cost savings and flexibility, but they also make it challenging for traditional network monitoring tools to measure QoS effectively. Since organizations no longer house most network infrastructure on premises, directly monitoring certain types of traffic and equipment is considerably more complex. Modern hybrid networks demand a more flexible, lightweight solution. Otherwise, you risk blind spots that can hamper your ability to identify, troubleshoot, and ultimately resolve performance problems...