Being a network engineer is hard. Being a network engineer without visibility is harder. The constant battle with other IT teams asking, “is it the network?” can be exhausting and hard to prove (to them) that, no, it’s not the network.
But when your network meets another (cloud) network – that battle becomes even more difficult to prove.
In the old days (as my kids refer to it) when we drove to work, we had no idea how long it would take. We knew, given ideal conditions, what it SHOULD take, but we had no more visibility than what was in front of us.
Now, we have a phone that shows a map and shows pain points along our commute. It can tell us our arrival time based on these calculations, and it’s pretty accurate. It can even suggest alternate routes. THAT is visibility beyond your “network”.
The same holds true with corporate to cloud networks. While everything might look good leaving your neighborhood (network), there may be traffic jams along the way, and for apps and services to work properly, everything has to work correctly and as expected along the entire path.
I once managed a large WAN/Datacenter environment and had no visibility into the network. Our IT team begged for visibility tools but were told there was no money. One day, my supervisor left for a month-long trip to India. The day he left, I installed a demo of Riverbed Cascade (now called NetProfiler). It was AMAZING what we were able to discover, and the reports we were able to generate.
We were having app and connectivity trouble with a large cloud database provider. They insisted that our VPN connection was going down and that we need to check our network (it wasn’t the network). NetProfiler allowed me to watch the traffic flows going to and from this provider. It showed that, while our HR app was down, we were still passing traffic to other servers in their environment, across that same VPN. The traffic stopped at their load balancer. It was not our network. It was something on their end.
This solved a months-long disagreement and saved a near-cancellation of the contract with the vendor. By having proper visibility, we were able to show exactly where to look, and the problem was solved within a day.
We got the tool paid for after this. All the business units chipped in when they saw the benefits of visibility and ease of troubleshooting, and they loved the daily reports they received for their apps.
Visibility is key. Knowing what and where to troubleshoot can make all the difference.
For more information about Teneo’s Visibility Services, visit: teneo.net/dem
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