Is your unified observability solution enough to solve today’s hybrid cloud challenges?

Unified network observability is critical for enterprise application performance today, but at the same time there’s a problem: unified observability is not enough to actually tackle the performance issues faced by these modern networks.

The use of hybrid application environments is commonplace today. Roughly 89 percent of network decision makers polled in a recent network observability study from VMware said their organization currently uses hybrid applications that mix public and private clouds and on-premise infrastructure. Almost a third of these companies run at least half of their applications in a hybrid environment.

But as the study noted, 97 percent of the companies said they were having trouble monitoring their cloud application environment, a key component of this hybrid architecture. The leading problems: lack of unified visibility, an inability to bring visibility to all teams that needed it, and insufficient insight into cloud resource usage.

Unified observability is a start

The default solution for this widespread application performance visibility problem is unified observability. With unified observability, businesses see their entire network architecture end-to-end even in a hybrid environment that includes public and private cloud resources.

With this unified observability, organizations can identify the exact location of a network performance issue because all parts of the network are monitored. With this end-to-end visibility, businesses can also pinpoint the root cause of application performance issues and more easily resolve them.

The problem that transcends unified observability: east-west traffic monitoring

Unfortunately, unified observability is not enough to fully diagnose and resolve many application performance issues in a modern hybrid environment.

That’s because there’s still a missing piece in the chain of observability even with end-to-end network performance monitoring – what takes place between resources within a given cloud service.

An example is a cloud service that relies on an SQL database within the same cloud environment. The root of an application performance issue might be a delay between the database and the cloud service, but this sub-level of performance monitoring won’t necessarily show up in unified observability monitoring tools because the issue is taking place within a given node in the cloud network architecture.

Essentially, application performance is being observed in north-south directions up and down the network stack. But even though there is unified observability north-south, the east-west traffic within a given node is not fully monitored.

As you may have noticed, the fundamental problem is the granularity of unified observability. There is unified observability across the entire network and application stack, but this observability is not granular enough to always be useful and tease out the root cause for an application performance problem.

The reason for this lack of granularity is not a technical problem, it is a human problem – services in a hybrid network environment often are opaque and don’t bring the requisite visibility by design due to business imperatives that create walled gardens. East-west traffic within a cloud service is often hard to monitor and sync up with a larger view of the overall network.

Solving the east-west application performance challenge

Thankfully, there are technical workarounds for this very human problem.

First, many cloud services monitor and report the data needed for granular unified visibility even if this data does not easily integrate with network and application performance monitoring solutions.

So the first technical workaround is using a unified observability solution that can ingest third-party data in addition to the native visibility data it collects. The merging of native end-to-end performance data and third-party performance data from a cloud service can overcome the visibility challenge of walled garden environments.

The second technical workaround is using lightweight virtual sensors to monitor east-west traffic within cloud services even if the cloud provider does not give this visibility. This is possible by tapping a SPAN port so a copy of this east-west traffic is monitored and the data from this monitoring can be fed back into the overall network and application performance monitoring solution that is bringing the unified observability.

With these two workarounds, organizations can surmount the challenge of monitoring east-west traffic and regain a full performance picture.

Accedian Skylight delivers a complete picture of network and application performance

Accedian Skylight was built from the ground up to bring this level of monitoring and address the challenges of the modern hybrid cloud network environment.

Skylight is a network and application performance monitoring solution that monitors network traffic-end-to-end with lightweight virtual sensors that capture both north-south and east-west traffic. Skylight then feeds this data into an easily understood dashboard that gives a complete, real-time picture of an organization’s network dynamics.

Skylight also enables businesses to feed in third-party data sources into this dashboard, correlating traffic data with the third-party tools and data sources for an even more complete picture of network and performance health and user experience.

To see Accedian Skylight in action, visit our on-demand product tours and then schedule a custom demo today.