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John Smith , Founder , CTO and EVP at LiveAction
happening with network traffic , but also to understand specific issues that are occurring . Enterprise-level tools allow for the consolidation of all these data sources , so you have a complete picture of your entire network , across all domains ( in one platform ) and display them appropriately through dashboards , reports and alerts .
Dashboards provide a high-level view summarizing information , but also display alerts usually based on key applications , sites and devices . Network traffic monitoring generally requires both real-time and historic reporting . Real-time reports are visual analytics for monitoring what ’ s going on with current network traffic .
Historic reports are useful for planning , providing updates to stakeholders and forensic troubleshooting of network incidents . More complex network environments require reporting processing at scale as network data sizes can be massive and slow down most monitoring tools .
Proactive alerts are vital for tuning into network traffic issues that need immediate attention . Increasingly , these alerts are powered by AI and Machine Learning so that anomalies in network traffic are automatically detected and potentially grouped into insights to help determine the root cause of the issues .
6 ) The final step is the deployment and day-to-day operations of the network monitoring solution . There may be specific workflows required such as capacity planning , application usage , WAN SLA reports and optimization of the networks and performance for specific applications . Especially for large enterprise networks , the ability to monitor a distributed environment with multiple key data sources – such as flow and packets – at scale is needed to provide information for optimization tasks . Some of the more complex optimizations may require multi-segment analysis where flow and packets from specific transactions are stitched together to see the application performance at various hops within the network .
Many enterprises will need to optimize voice , video , web conferencing , collaboration and unified communications , which may involve monitoring and adjusting QoS ( quality of service ) telemetry and policies . These types of applications generally have the most common and obvious network traffic performance issues . End-users often encounter jitters and loss of packets , when using voice , video or other communications applications in slow networks .
These usually surface as poor video , voice quality or user experiences . Using flow and packet analysis is critical to isolating and quickly resolving network traffic issues . QoS is about monitoring and managing data traffic to reduce congestion and improve jitter , loss and latency on the network per an established service level .
Establishing QoS policies and managing them ensures network resources get the necessary bandwidth to meet required service levels . Monitoring traffic to established QoS policies is fundamental to proper network traffic monitoring and optimization .
The stakes around network monitoring have never been higher as complexity and security become paramount concerns for organizations . Having the right tools in place , combined with platforms that centralize management and collection of visibility data is critical to ensuring your NetOps resources are used productively . p
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