Avoid Network Operations Center Finger Pointing
You need to get crucial monitoring and performance data to the right teams to avoid finger pointing when things slow down - let's face it, the last thing you really want to do when traffic is high is to have to invoke traffic calming to queue people to your website. Enterprise IT staff typically have daily, war room meetings to review and discuss network and application performance.
Those who pass the finger-pointing test get to go home while others have to stay and figure out what went wrong with the network, the servers, and the applications.
Here are four tips to help avoid that finger pointing at critical times.
1) Keep IT Simple. You don't have to be in Media, eCommerce or retail to know that solving IT problems quickly can make a huge difference in the overall performance of your organiszations IT and client / customer facing business applications. The simpler your network and application monitoring tools and alerting systems, the easier it is for you to determine where the problem is, why its occurring and what needs to be fixed!
Sounds simple right? But when you have complicated, non-shared tools for network performance management (NPM) and application performance management (APM), IT and network teams typically get hampered by any attempts to problem solve together as a cohesive team. Whilst in the the past, that did not matter as much because fixing the network usually solved most end user experience challenges. That's not the case now - i had just last week a client who'd been trying to fix some intermittent user issues for 3 weeks!!
Within today's Hybrid Enterprise and with so many components affecting application performance, it's not always the network that is at fault.... it could be an application, part of an application, a database server or your Internet pipe! Knowing and fixing quickly is key to keeping the business running smoothly!
2) Manage from the Top Down not Bottom Up - the critical ingredient to the success of any business is to have the customer or end-user experience of business critical applications at the top of your priority list! With today's hybrid enterprise and with applications and services spread across so many systems with many inter-dependencies, you need a performance engineering team that can manage and work across a number of different teams. Without this joined up approach, everyone will be working in their own silo and with no accountability for the overall success of your application delivery
3) Ensure you have an integrated Cross-Architecture performance dash board - lmost all troubleshooting begins in the NOC. As a network operator, you get a quick view of whether you have an application problem or a site problem with a dashboards like this:
This dashboard in the NOC gets you started. Where you go from here is up to the data and must be easily shared across teams to be effective when troubleshooting and fixing and issue.The dashboard above is from Riverbed's SteelCentral.
4) Remember - Better Together! - With a comprehensive set of passive and active NPM and APM monitoring tools such as those from Riverbed's complete Application Performance Platform™, you have a much better chance of solving application performance issues across teams and much faster.
Another advantage of Riverbed's set of solutions is a continued commitment to "Better Together" solutions. For example, AppResponse 9.5 now integrates with SteelHead 9.0 for visibiility and troubleshooting WAN-optimized web applications on premise or by SaaS.
SteelCentral NetProfiler provides deep packet inspection (DPI) data of the specific ports, protocols, and applications running in your branch offices from another together-is-better solution by integrating with SteelHead.
Cisilion are proud to Riverbed Premier Plus Partners and Riverbed Authorized Support Partners. Contact us for more information, to book a demo or explore a Proof of Concept.