Beating the Two Top Network Management Challenges

by Valerie DiMartino Jun 14, 2021

Is Your Network Ready for Digital Transformation?

Network management challenges for highly complex infrastructure are harder to overcome than ever. NetOps teams have been tasked with an enormous number of challenges. They solve thousands of tickets generated by tools like SolarWinds or ServiceNow daily. They also need to ensure network uptime across multi-hybrid networks, including:

• Multi-cloud
• Traditional
• Virtual
• Software-defined

In reality, many companies lack the resources to manage today’s complex networks. The more tasks teams have to manage manually in a short time, the more error-prone the system becomes. Regarding the network, operational disruptions can limit productivity for much longer than necessary.

How Can IT Teams Ensure the Network Stays Reliable, Secure, Flexible, Expandable, and Cost-Effective?

Let’s discuss two main network management challenges every NetOps is facing today — maintaining around-the-clock uptime and achieving end-to-end visibility.

Importance of 24/7 Network Uptime Throughout the Business

Network downtime can have a significant impact on your enterprise and processes, leading to:

• Financial losses
• Productivity decreases
• Resolution delays

The more secure your network, the better for your business.

End-to-End Visibility Across Hybrid Network Infrastructures

Ensuring that all structures have sufficient visibility is essential when working with a hybrid network. Examples of structures present in hybrid infrastructures may include:

• Public clouds
• Data centers
• Cisco ACI
• VMWare NSX

We’ll discuss these structures and others like them as they relate to network performance management below.

1. Network Uptime

Enterprises experience thousands of IT events every day. Many are urgent, and they all require manual effort, causing longer resolution times. You know that your business can’t wait. How can you maximize network uptime and minimize MTTR from the public cloud to the data center to the access edge and everywhere in between, across branches and geographies? You need a certain degree of automation to perform a series of balancing acts. Let’s take a look at some possible steps.

Step 1: Automate the Diagnosis of Common Problems

If you work with IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms, look at the incidents your service desk works on. These tools usually give a very deep visibility into what problems occur day after day. Now, you can pick three to five common tickets and start automating them. But don’t start with the difficult ones — go step by step.

If you work with NetBrain, you should already have an integration with all your existing monitoring or ticketing tools. You can benefit from triggered diagnostic automation to:

• Eliminate idle time
• Identify problems faster
• Automatically rule out potential problems

After getting all this data, you can easily isolate the root cause and save your knowledge into an executable runbook.

NetBrain allows engineers to organize common troubleshooting steps into repeatable Runbooks (without coding!). When troubleshooting, junior engineers can leverage senior engineers’ expertise using these step-by-step diagnostics. You can analyze hundreds of potential issues across two devices or 200 in seconds.

Step 2: Enable Easy Handoffs for Less Common Problems

In this step, it is time to examine less common network issues. For these kinds of problems, NetBrain can easily and quickly create a map of the relevant part of the network on demand. It could be a path of an application flow or a site map and helps to provide visualization across any infrastructure, including:

• Multi-cloud
• Traditional
• Virtual
• SD-WAN
• SDN

Engineers can now use interactive Data Views to display additional information. Overviews help you see where to take action by letting you view routing protocols, interface information, QoS metrics, and more. Get visual support to understand the network’s state without having to use telnet/SSH for multiple devices.

All these troubleshooting steps are automatically documented and can be taken over by a Level 2 or Level 3 engineer.

Step 3: Get Enhanced Collaboration to Solve Complex Problems

Last but not least, to maximize network uptime, you need the entire IT team to work together to solve issues. NetBrain Incident Collaboration facilitates collaboration among NetOps, SecOps, DevOps, and other IT departments. It allows IT users to troubleshoot together and use their collective expertise to fix network issues faster.

2. Management of Hybrid Networks

Now that we have established that automation is a must, let’s see how it can help to manage your hybrid network and give you full visibility of any network data.

Many of today’s network infrastructures are moving from the traditional LAN/WAN toward SDN and a hybrid cloud model. This approach makes the network more complex despite the won agility for provisioning services. As a result, manual methods of documentation (like Visio) and troubleshooting (via CLI) no longer scale.

NetBrain discovers and decodes the entire hybrid infrastructure. It automatically maps the network end-to-end, allowing you to manage it from a single interface.

Visibility for Traditional LAN/WAN and Data Centers

With NetBrain, you dynamically visualize each aspect of your traditional network. Explore the data center, campus, or WAN from both a layer-3 and layer-2 perspective.

Visibility for Cisco ACI

NetBrain helps you visualize your ACI infrastructure from several perspectives, with views including:

• Overlay
• Underlay
• Application-centric

This visibility allows the whole team, not just the architects who engineered it, to help troubleshoot ACI.

Visibility for VMware NSX

NetBrain helps teams visualize their NSX infrastructure and maps the relationship between the network and the VMs it runs on. VM and network teams are finally on the same page, working together to resolve problems. Learn more about NSX Mapping Automation.

Visibility for Software-Defined WAN

The WAN has changed a lot, from frame relay to MPLS and IPSec VPNs. Now, SD-WAN is quickly gaining adoption. With NetBrain, it’s easy to dynamically map your WAN no matter what technology you use.

Visibility for Public Cloud

It’s often difficult to pinpoint the cause of a cloud application issue. Teams with a hybrid cloud may struggle to determine whose network the problem is on. NetBrain offers visibility across the entire shared network and helps IT teams collaborate with their cloud provider.

Network management challenges are a constant for IT teams. Automation is necessary to meet companies’ needs for continuous technology development. If you can achieve network uptime throughout the business across any (hybrid) network infrastructure, you’ve already won half the battle.