Less toil and troubleshooting with proactive monitoring

As digital transformation has become increasingly mainstream over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, an enterprise’s digital infrastructure is now the critical foundation of many businesses. 

In an era of interconnected intelligent systems and networks, unplanned downtime for even just a few minutes is expensive and disruptive, and can echo across the entire ecosystem. 

Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) conducted an Hourly Cost of Downtime survey of 1,200 organizations from January through July 2021. Roughly 91 percent of mid-sized enterprises among their respondents said that a single hour of server downtime would cost them $300,000 or more—and 44 percent said that it would cost them between $1 million and $5 million.

These costs are tied to lost productivity, revenue, and other intangibles related to downtime. Companies that can diagnose network outages more quickly can shorten their mean time to resolution (MTTR) and thus increase their business advantage. Enterprises with longer MTTR will see degraded performance and lose business advantages to rivals.

MTTR is a good metric for organizations to use to track the reliability of their equipment and systems, from common desktop service requests such as basic troubleshooting of a laptop computer or connectivity problems, to server failures and other malfunctioning system components that can have a significant impact. According to ZK Research, 90 percent of MTTR is spent just trying to figure out if there’s really a problem in the first place. Incorrect diagnosis or inadequate repairs can lengthen MTTR.

Four factors that lengthen MTTR

Here are four major factors that lengthen MTTR in our experience:

• Silo-based tooling, different systems—servers, applications, networks, and so on—each use their own monitoring tools. In this scenario, there is no overall holistic view of the entire system, and no visibility into user experience nor performance drivers.
• Insufficient look-back time, which makes it difficult to diagnose intermittent problems.
• Visibility gaps in cloud, IaaS, SaaS, virtual, and east-west traffic from server to server within a datacenter.
• Lack of evidence that makes it impossible to locate the root cause of a problem or trigger a reaction from tech vendors.

Steps to reduce MTTR

In order to reduce MTTR, businesses need to make the right information available by allowing proper routing and evidence-based management. Cases must be directed to the right team who can get fixes implemented immediately.

The next step is to take a wide-angle view to cover all user activities and applications. Visibility gaps must be closed; monitoring must encompass all production environments, including virtual, SaaS, IaaS, and cloud platforms. You should embrace automatic monitoring and diagnosis, and analyze data in real time. And to achieve long look-back times for performance diagnostics, you must establish baseline data for comparison.

Proactive versus reactive monitoring

Normally, IT administrators use passive or reactive monitoring to gather user data and analyze it over time. This data provides a holistic view of a network’s performance and can cover a wide spectrum of network metrics. It keeps track of issues that directly affect users.  

However, passive network monitoring doesn’t make changes based on active predictions, and can only alert network administrators to end user problems that have already occured and need to be addressed immediately. It also produces large amounts of data which can get expensive to store, and unfortunately, can only measure traffic inside the network.

Proactive monitoring, by contrast, works on specific aspects of the network to analyze performance. It simulates user behavior to determine potential network performance issues and produces much less data overall. The major benefit is its ability to maintain complete visibility into the network and see potential problem areas before they affect users.

Thanks to real-time analysis, proactive monitoring can instantly eliminate blind spots by gaining info on performance everywhere on the network, both inside and outside the network. It is used to find and report issues such as packet loss, jitter, and poor response times.

Active monitoring takes a proactive approach to network troubleshooting by highlighting potential problem areas before they affect the end user. For administrators or help desk staff, it eliminates network troubleshooting tasks.

Thanks to real-time analysis, proactive monitoring can instantly eliminate blind spots by gaining info on performance everywhere on the network, both inside and outside the network. It is used to find and report issues such as packet loss, jitter, and poor response times.

Active monitoring also helps determine the baseline performance of newly-integrated hardware. Most active monitors Active monitoring sensors are configurable, allowing you to target specific areas of the network to watch over. The IT team can see how new connections affect network performance and prevent bottlenecks before they hit the end user.

In a nutshell, active monitoring provides end-to-end, multi-site network visibility and troubleshooting capabilities, as well as simple service level agreement (SLA) and customer experience monitoring for a wide range of applications, including voice, video, web services, and critical enterprise applications.

Proactive network performance monitoring provides many benefits, ranging from quicker identification and isolation of problems, decreasing MTTR for issues that affect users, improved network uptime performance and SLA compliance, easier monitoring of application, datacenter, and cloud performance, and smoother deployment of new services and applications.

With the right tools, businesses can actively and passively monitor their infrastructure for full visibility, eliminate blind spots and downtime costs, and decrease MTTR and time spent on network troubleshooting.

Accedian Skylight can help improve your reactive and proactive monitoring and oversee network performance and the end user experience. Request a live demo to learn more.