An application is moving slowly or not performing correctly at random times. A videoconference on Microsoft Teams has dropped frames and latency—sometimes. There’s a bandwidth problem, but the service provider swears all systems are running as they should.

These are typical problems in business today, but finding solutions for them is more complex than ever, thanks to hybrid cloud environments.

Almost every business is currently operating in a hybrid cloud environment, even if it thinks it has transitioned entirely to the cloud. There are almost always at least some on-premise systems operating within a business, and this means most businesses must contend with the problem of a complex mesh of cloud and on-premise systems operating together.

The challenge of resolving performance issues in hybrid environments

When business systems were mostly on-premise, the challenge of identifying performance issues was hard enough. Discovering the root cause of a problem amid the complex interplay of systems required monitoring network performance metrics and spotting issues among the relationships between various elements of the infrastructure.

This could be done with appliances and monitoring tools baked into the on-premise infrastructure. But this kind of visibility typically is not available in a cloud environment. Some parts of the network still can be monitored in the traditional way, but there are wide gaps as the distance between elements of an organization’s infrastructure physically grows, and as the infrastructure gets more diverse and complex.

Is the business able to monitor all the connections among the various services at the application level, the network level, and within the cloud?

Almost always the answer is “sorta.” There’s a measure of visibility within the cloud stack, a measure of visibility on each portion of the network, and visibility within an organization’s walls. But there’s no unified end-to-end visibility that enables pinpointing the root cause of problems, or ideally spotting them before they happen. The complex relationships among an organization’s hybrid infrastructure are balkanized and opaque, and often the performance of a Wi-Fi router in an employee’s home or the connection between a cloud service and a network service provider are taken on faith.

Application and network performance requires full visibility

Diagnosing the root cause of a performance issue with a hybrid cloud environment is like finding a needle in a haystack unless there’s full visibility.

There may be a periodic problem with delays or jitter in Microsoft Teams, for instance. Microsoft says everything is fine on their end. The network provider might say that everything looks good between the business and the cloud service. But the problem persists. Where to turn? How to figure out what’s actually creating the problem?

Without full visibility, the problem likely will persist. But if there’s end-to-end visibility, network engineers can spot the little variances that reveal the actual problems; they can discover these needles with full visibility because the entire haystack is mapped and visible.

When there’s full visibility, the business might discover that there isn’t an issue at all with Teams or even the network, but instead a printer has been moved between offices and now is making frequent DNS calls that periodically disrupt the network at a specific site that is using Teams.

The issue might not be at the application level at all, but a printer that was moved and not reprogrammed. But without full visibility, an organization likely will not be able to spot this unexpected and unrelated root cause of the problem.

How to get full network visibility

Most businesses are flying blind because they are relying on older network and performance monitoring technology that was built for an on-premise world. This technology is able to monitor part of the network, and frequently it is based on snapshots taken at intervals of 5-15 minutes. This is not enough visibility for the complexity of hybrid cloud environments.

On the other hand, a modern network and performance monitoring solution such as Accedian Skylight captures 100 percent of activity and gives full visibility by relying on virtual sensors all along the network that mirror traffic in real-time and thus captures the actual relationships among cloud, network and on-premise resources. By having sensors end-to-end and the resulting data fed into a centralized dashboard, businesses can discover exactly where there are variances in baseline performance at specific times, and uncover where the actual problems are taking place.

With this full visibility, businesses can narrow down network and performance problems and avoid the frustration of blame and denial that frequently come from performance issues in a hybrid environment. And when the problem is on the cloud or service provider level, this full visibility can provide the incontrovertible proof of where the problem is taking place.
Learn more about how Accedian Skylight can deliver full visibility in a hybrid cloud environment, or watch a demo today.