How to choose a network performance monitoring solution

Author: Simon Rowley

by Paul Gray, Chief Product Officer at LiveAction.

Enterprise networks are undergoing huge changes. It’s not uncommon for an enterprise to find that it has quickly outgrown its NPM and that it simply cannot cover the true scope of the enterprise’s new geography of activity.

LiveAction’s 2024 Network performance and monitoring trends investigated the current state of NPM solutions, surveying hundreds of enterprises on their experiences. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of respondents managed on-premises networks, 70% said they manage cloud environments, 61% said they’re running hybrid architectures and 43% are managing WAN and SD-WAN networks. This kind of environment diversity signifies a huge change from previous generations’ traditionally homogenous corporate networks. However, their NPM solutions often cannot keep up with their growing networks, much less their future ambitions.

Over half (57%) reported that they lack visibility into exactly the places they now manage – such as cloud SD-WAN, WLAN but also growing areas like Voice and Video. Nearly half (49%) say that their current NPMs cannot generate actionable insights that will allow them to solve the problems quickly. Crucially, 43% of respondents also report that their NPMs struggle to scale as the data volumes and network complexity increase. This isn’t just a matter of simple network management, but the long-term health of the larger organisation. To innovate, enterprises have to be able to understand their environments and make sure that they run efficiently and securely so that they can accommodate new transformations.

Searching questions

So what then? Enterprises will need to consider their options. Choosing a new NPM is more complex than picking it off the shelf. An organisation on the hunt for a new NPM will first need to ask themselves several searching questions about what will fit with their goals and needs.

They’ll first have to understand their current needs and how, if applicable, their current NPM is failing them. For example, are there new types and traffic loads the current infrastructure cannot handle? Are they dealing with new security threats that their NPM is repeatedly missing? Are their attempts to decrypt traffic introducing compliance risks?

The current environment and network activity’s true scope must also be addressed. Whatever NPM solution a business chooses, it must accommodate its various environments, from data centres to multi-clouds.

It’s crucial for future intentions as well. If a business wants to hybridise its environment or roll out large IoT deployments, its choice of NPM provider may change significantly. Depending on future transformation goals, a business will need to consider how well a solution can scale to meet practical realities and future ambitions.

NPMs for today’s landscape

Businesses must choose the solution that works for them; however, some characteristics are critical in today’s landscape.

Firstly, comprehensive end-to-end network visibility and performance management should be considered fundamental. That includes visibility across SD-WAN, WAN, LAN, public, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This is especially important because problems might spring up in one part of the network, but may emanate from another. The ability to pinpoint the origin of such problems is an absolute necessity, especially across the diverse range of environments of today’s modern networks.

Network Traffic Analysis is also crucial because businesses need to be able to use deep packet capture, netflow, and analytics to monitor network traffic in real time and granularly inspect the contents of individual packets without decrypting them.

Application performance and visibility monitoring are critical to correlate data across network devices, applications, cloud environments, and other places to maximise application performance.

The ability to visualise network activity will also be important to unlock a strategic view of network activity. This will allow issues to be quickly tracked to their root cause and relevant specialists to gain a holistic view of network activity.

Justifying new purchases to the board

There’s also a crucial question here about how to justify the purchase of new NPM tools to management. C-suite level executives and managers with control over budget are not tech-savvy. From that point of view, they can view large purchases or infrastructural changes with scepticism. As such, the technical team must justify their budgets on a higher level.

The first step on this path involves understanding the perceived risks of adopting a new NPM solution. Implementation may be complex, involve potential disruptions, and be costly. These concerns must be addressed head-on so that they can be rationally weighed against the benefits of a new solution.

Equally, those benefits have to be stated clearly. Executives and managers need to know how a particular solution can proactively identify issues, optimise network performance, and contribute to further innovation, ROI, and competitive advantage.

Enterprises need not go into a new solution full-bore. Many vendors offer trial periods for their solutions so that customers can see how they run in their environment and otherwise meet their needs. Changes like these can be expensive so no choice should be made lightly. However, by proactively addressing and demystifying the perceived risks, a new NPM solution can help adapt an organisation to growing network demands and lay a foundation for further innovation.

For more from LiveAction, click here.