The complexity of hybrid cloud network architectures ensures that there will be occasional performance issues even with the most proactive monitoring. How application and network performance monitoring is approached can make a big difference in the volume and severity of these performance issues, however.

But first, let’s start with some data. Application and network downtime costs real money. Roughly 91 percent of mid-sized companies polled during the first half of 2021 said that an hour of server downtime would cost them more than $300,000, according to an Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) study. For roughly 44 percent of those firms, an hour of downtime would amount to a loss of between $1 million and $5 million.

This is just the known costs of performance issues, however. Most performance issues are less dramatic and obvious, and go unreported. Think about those video calls that were cut short due to network performance issues, or applications that were slow or unavailable during a time of need. While not as dramatic as significant downtime, and often not reported at all, these small performance issues nonetheless eat away at a business one hiccup at a time.

So the stakes are high for application and network performance monitoring. Yet, much of an organization’s performance monitoring takes a reactive approach when a better alternative exists.

The difference between proactive and reactive performance monitoring

Reactive performance monitoring is looking at historical data and addressing problems as they arise. When there’s an issue with an application, or network trouble, the IT team investigates and attempts a fix.

Proactive performance monitoring, on the other hand, focuses on addressing problems as they emerge instead of after the fact. This type of monitoring proactively searches for issues and signs of potential problems in real-time, and attempts to resolve them before anyone in the organization is aware there is an issue brewing. Proactive monitoring includes both actual traffic inspection, as well as synthetic monitoring that simulates traffic activity to see if applications and networks hold up under expected conditions.

The impact of reactive monitoring

The reactive approach to application and network monitoring is the historical norm, largely because it takes less resources to carry out. Older performance monitoring solutions also typically lean on the reactive approach because it was adequate for much of the time when organizational activity took place on-premise.

As organizations move toward hybrid cloud architectures, network complexity increases exponentially. With more potential points of failure existing in hybrid environments, reactive monitoring creates several problems.

1. Solving performance issues gets harder

Roughly 90 percent of the time it takes to resolve a performance issue comes from diagnosing the problem, according to ZK Research. That’s because the symptoms of an application or network performance issue frequently are unrelated to the cause.

For example, there might be periodic issues with Microsoft Teams video conferencing latency within an organization. With a proactive monitoring approach, complete and real-time performance data might reveal that at the time of slowdown, a relocated office printer is making excessive DNS requests that clog the network.

With reactive monitoring, however, this complex relationship between the videoconferencing and the printer might be very hard to spot.

2. Network slowness issues go unresolved

The vast majority of application and network performance issues go unreported. An app slows down, a network connection breaks temporarily, throughput reduces video transmission for a 10-minute period. Most users will notice these issues but suffer through them. Only acute performance issues will get reported, in most cases.

With a reactive performance monitoring approach, these smaller, non-acute performance issues will hurt productivity but go unresolved because they are never flagged for investigation. Or, at best, they are reported far after the fact and don’t command attention.

In contract, a proactive performance monitoring approach will spot these deviations from the baseline and automatically flag or adjust accordingly. More importantly, awareness of these small disruptions might assist with uncovering larger performance issues before they emerge.

3. Performance issues increase

Prevention is always better than mitigation. The greatest problem with a reactive performance monitoring approach to hybrid cloud architectures is performance issues that could have been prevented.

When application and network performance issues are addressed at the time of impact, it is too late. The damage already has been done, and performance has been compromised.

A proactive approach, on the other hand, analyzes traffic patterns in real-time and notices when performance baselines are compromised. In some cases this reveals an emerging problem in the making, and in other cases it signals a need for more network resources. Either way, there are less performance issues that develop.

Given the complexity of the hybrid cloud environments emerging today, a reactive approach exacts a considerable toll compared with an active approach to application and network performance monitoring that entails end-to-end, real-time analysis of all company-related network traffic.

While there is a place for reactive performance monitoring, organizations with a hybrid cloud architecture should not rely on it alone.

Learn more about how Accedian Skylight can deliver full visibility in a hybrid cloud environment, or watch a demo today.