Managing today’s complex enterprise networks isn’t easy. Every day, NetOps teams face challenges in understanding how the network is performing and reacting to network issues that can slow the network – or take it down entirely. But there is hope, backed by solid data.
LiveAction worked with Forrester Consulting to deliver a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study on LiveNX and LiveWire, a combined solution that LiveAction customers are using to visualize their entire network to quickly identify and troubleshoot network performance issues.
As part of the Forrester TEI study, LiveAction customers were interviewed about their experience with LiveNX and LiveWire, including the obstacles they faced in monitoring and managing their networks before implementing LiveAction. In the course of their customer interviews, Forrester identified three key challenges that are familiar to most NetOps teams:
- The lack of a centralized platform to efficiently manage all devices.
- The inability to monitor and analyze flow efficiently.
- Scalability, or the difficulty of managing fast-growing network infrastructures.
LiveAction’s LiveNX network performance management (NPM) platform and LiveWire high-speed packet capture solution address all three challenges, helping our customers keep their networks fully optimized. In this blog series, we’ll explore each challenge in depth and show you how LiveAction’s solutions can help your enterprise achieve better network performance and cost savings.
Too Many Network Management Tools
To begin the series, let’s dive into the first challenge – too many tools. The Forrester TEI study found that enterprises struggle with monitoring and managing their networks because they often have a mishmash of management tools that don’t play well together.
As one financial services technology team leader told Forrester, “Prior to using LiveAction, there really wasn’t much there…no centralized way of looking at the data and figuring out issues.” Before they began using LiveAction, the network team had to “log on to routers, switches, and network devices to dig through logs, looking for issues and resolving them on the fly.”
It’s not uncommon for NetOps pros to need up to 10 different tools to monitor network environments as they manage on-premises, WAN/SD-WAN, cloud, and hybrid networks that don’t share data well. But without the ability to integrate all the data, network operators can’t get a comprehensive picture, leading to a lack of visibility that makes it time-consuming and tedious to identify troublesome issues.
Failing to quickly identify problems can also be very expensive: network downtime can cost companies an average of $300,000 an hour in lost revenue and productivity. In addition to tool sprawl, network complexity and data complexity can lead to wasted money and reduced productivity.
Put a Stop to Tool Sprawl
LiveAction solves this challenge by providing one centralized platform for managing all the devices on a network. LiveNX provides a single pane of glass for monitoring and troubleshooting complex multi-vendor, multi-domain, multi-cloud networks. Leveraging LiveNX, network operators can manage all of the devices across the network in a single place, reducing the need for multiple monitoring tools.
And when LiveNX is combined with LiveWire, network blind spots are eliminated. LiveWire delivers visibility in places where there is not much granularity in the data (think remote offices or the cloud). By converting packets into flow data, LiveWire feeds the LiveNX platform the intelligence needed to visualize the entire network while offering the necessary packet-level data for network forensics, giving your NetOps team essential information to troubleshoot intermittent or complex issues quickly and efficiently.
When NetOps teams juggle too many tools for monitoring network environments, issues affecting network performance are much harder to hunt down and take a lot longer to solve. The Forrester TEI study found that LiveAction vastly improves network visibility by giving NetOps pros a single pane of glass to view all their network applications. The result is one source of truth to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve network and application performance issues – quickly and easily.
In the next blog post, we’ll explore the challenge of monitoring and analyzing network flow and how LiveAction helps enterprises come out on top. Stay tuned!
LiveAction is hosting two live Webinars, on March 8th and March 9th, for an in-depth first look at the Forrester Research study, “The Total Economic Impact of LiveNX and LiveWire”. Register here to join LiveAction CTO John Smith and Forrester Consultant Chris Loza, and learn more about what LiveAction can do for you.
— by David Weiss. David is Content Marketing Manager for LiveAction.
