Troubleshooting hybrid cloud network performance with better visibility

Many businesses are currently taking a hybrid approach to IT infrastructure that mixes network resources from across service providers, public and private cloud providers and application providers. Hybrid cloud utilization has increased as firms mix business and consumer tools, enable employees to work from home, and ensure that there is adequate security and control of key systems.

One challenge with hybrid cloud architectures is network troubleshooting. When network resources consist of a host of systems and service providers, network visibility becomes a problem. Network issues inevitably will arise, but diagnosing the root cause can be challenging without end-to-end visibility.

The challenges of limited network visibility

Inadequate network performance visibility leads to a host of problems for IT departments. Some of the challenges that a lack of visibility brings when businesses rely on a hybrid cloud architecture include:

• How does an organization ensure it is getting the network performance it paid for?

• How is network quality of service maintained?

• How can end user experience be protected?

• How can the root cause of issues be defined in the face of inadequate KPIs that don’t tell the whole story?

• How can IT departments streamline troubleshooting when diagnosis is hard?

• How can organizations get resolution and avoid finger pointing from both providers and departments within the organization?

These challenges lead to time-consuming trouble ticket workflows, delays in finding the root cause for network problems, an inability to know if the issue is with the company or the service provider, and problems proving the situation to a provider when the network performance issues are on the service provider level.

How to bring network visibility to hybrid cloud architectures

Increased network performance visibility is the key to quickly troubleshooting hybrid cloud architectures when things go wrong.

There are three key components to visibility that enable a business to effectively troubleshoot hybrid cloud networks by actually understanding what’s going on within these heterogeneous networks.

1. End-to-end traffic monitoring

The most important component for troubleshooting hybrid cloud network performance is actually seeing network activity end-to-end. This means going beyond the key performance indicators of service and application providers and monitoring the actual traffic along the entirety of the network independent of each segment of the network.

This can be accomplished with lightweight virtual network sensors placed throughout the network, both at the edge and along the paths back to centralized cloud resources. The data from these sensors then can be aggregated into a cloud dashboard for a complete, real-time picture of network health.

2. Sub-second performance granularity

Almost as important as a complete picture of network activity is network performance data that actually uncovers performance issues; not all monitoring or KPIs are created equal.

Aside from using the right metrics, a key problem with hybrid cloud performance visibility is granularity. A network issue might come from micro-outages that will not be spotted if traffic monitoring is polling infrequently or aggregating traffic data too coarsely. If a sensor is polling traffic every 30 seconds, for instance, a KPI might look normal but hide a network performance issue that is taking place irregularly or on a sub-second level.

So a second key component of network performance visibility within hybrid cloud environments is monitoring network traffic with a high level of granularity instead of relying on performance monitoring that looks good but is not actually capturing the full details of performance issues.

3. Clear single-pane performance dashboards

The third essential for effectively troubleshooting hybrid cloud environments is making performance monitoring data clear and actionable. Many network performance monitoring solutions might pull data that theoretically can show the precise issues that impact network performance, but the key insights get lost in log data or require network forensics before a problem can be diagnosed.

To keep hybrid cloud networks running smoothly, businesses need this end-to-end, granular visibility pre-digested and clearly outlined on an easy-to-read dashboard that captures the full scope of network behavior in a single pane of glass dashboard.

At the same time, efficient troubleshooting of hybrid cloud environments needs this aggregation of network performance to be expandable so network engineers can spot the problem easily but then drill down to quickly see the details of exactly what is causing the network performance issue.

Efficient troubleshooting of today’s networks requires a cloud-based network performance monitoring solution that is able to ingest all data streams and help make sense of it with correlation and machine learning-based analytics.

Hybrid cloud performance troubleshooting made easy

Despite the complexity of hybrid cloud architectures, this level of visibility is possible and available today with Accedian Skylight. Skylight is a cloud-based application and network performance monitoring solution that uses lightweight virtual sensors and behavior analytics to bring end-to-end visibility and granularity to hybrid cloud network environments.

Built from the ground-up for today’s modern network architectures, Skylight can take the work out of troubleshooting network performance.

Learn more about the challenge of troubleshooting network performance today and see Skylight in action with our short webinar on the topic, SLA Assurance: Here’s how you can hold SPs accountable.