In the Forrester “The Total Economic Impact™ of LiveNX and LiveWire” study, NetOps professionals identified three major network performance management (NPM) challenges they faced before deploying LiveAction. Earlier in this blog series, we examined the effect of too many network management tools, and the inability to efficiently monitor and analyze flow.
In this post, we’ll cover the final challenge: scalability, or the difficulty of monitoring and managing fast-growing network infrastructures. As businesses grow, their network infrastructure must scale up to accommodate increased traffic and complexity. However, managing a larger, more complex network can be a daunting task without the right tools in place.
When Forrester interviewed LiveAction customers for the TEI report, they found that managing their networks as they grew became increasingly challenging. With different devices from multiple manufacturers using different networking methodologies – SD-WAN, cloud, and hybrid – efficient NPM at scale proved challenging. Multiple tools and software were needed to obtain a cohesive view of network and application performance.
Trying to manage this mix of solutions often frustrates network administrators, who must oversee fast-growing networks that include unfamiliar technology like SD-WAN and cloud. With their existing tools’ inability to cover the entire network, these NetOps teams found themselves piecing together their NPM coverage, making it extremely difficult to efficiently manage their networks as they increased in size and scope. As one solutions architect for a global manufacturer told Forrester, “Previous tools that we had out there just could not handle the size and scaling that we grew into today. You can’t have a site that maxes out capacity.”
Scalable NPM Architecture
The scalability equation changed once organizations equipped themselves with LiveAction: the LiveNX network performance management (NPM) platform and LiveWire high-speed packet analysis solution.
LiveAction solutions are designed to scale up in step with networks, providing NetOps teams with the ability to manage and troubleshoot networks of any size. The scalable architecture of LiveAction ensures that NetOps professionals can add devices, interfaces, and applications without having to worry about blind spots in their network or the inability to visualize hop-by-hop traffic.
LiveNX provides complete visibility into network performance, enabling NetOps teams to quickly identify and troubleshoot issues. With its unique ability to capture and enrich network flow data, and then analyze this data, LiveNX enables a deep understanding of the underlying traffic patterns and behavior. NetOps pros can also drill down into the packets to quickly pinpoint the root cause of any issues with LiveWire.
In the Forrester TEI report, LiveAction customers emphasized the importance of a scalable solution that grows with their network. According to one network engineer, “We’re thinking about putting some LiveWires [in some locations we identified] just to monitor their traffic and send us flow back. We’re growing our footprint and trying to go with the flow first, and because of the flexibility or visibility of the LiveAction tools, that’s the tool we’re using to progress along that path.”
By providing a single pane of glass to view and troubleshoot all their applications, LiveAction empowered the customers in the Forrester study with a unified platform that scales for multivendor, multidomain, and multicloud networks.
LiveAction Delivers Significant Impact
When Forrester embarked on their study of LiveAction’s Total Economic Impact, one of their main goals was to find out the most daunting NPM challenges facing NetOps professionals before they used LiveAction:
1. No centralized platform for efficient device management
2. Unable to efficiently monitor and analyze flow
3. Lack of scalability made it difficult to manage fast-growing network infrastructures
Things changed significantly for organizations that adopted LiveNX and LiveWire. With these solutions in place, they were able to easily visualize their entire network, allowing quick identification and troubleshooting of network and application performance issues.
Of course, the benefits of LiveAction don’t stop there. From equipment and bandwidth cost savings into the millions, valuable increases in business productivity, significant reductions in mean time to resolution (MTTR), and much more, the Forrester TEI study discovered deep advantages for organizations that leverage LiveAction.
Check out the study to find out the total impact of LiveAction! You can learn even more insights from this on-demand webinar, where LiveAction CTO John Smith and Forrester consultant Chris Loza discuss market trends and explore the study’s key findings in depth.
— by David Weiss. David is Content Marketing Manager for LiveAction.
