Checklist for Choosing a Network Performance Monitoring Solutions
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For network engineers navigating the complexities of enterprise networks, efficient management is key to ensuring seamless business operations and communication. The right Network Performance Management (NPM) solution is indispensable in avoiding operational malfunctions and possible financial repercussions.
When selecting an NPM solution, consider the following 10 items before making your investment.
01. Does the Solution Provide Comprehensive End-To-End Visibility?
Your NPM should collect extensive metrics, support application analysis, and provide performance alerts, while enhancing SD-WAN with advanced analytics for efficient, secure network management.
02. Does Your Solution Maximize the Benefits of SD-WAN?
For successful deployment and optimization of these networks, IT professionals need advanced tools for performance analytics, quality management, and traffic routing in the evolving landscape of software-defined networking.
03. Is Cloud Monitoring Supported?
With increasing cloud and hybrid IT adoption, network monitoring solutions now offer flexible management options on-premises, in the cloud, or by third-parties, and include extensive tools for bridging visibility gaps and optimizing cloud migration.
04. Does the Solution Provide Comprehensive Application Monitoring and Optimization?
Given the critical impact of network health on application performance, a network analytics solution must integrate application context with infrastructure metrics and traffic, addressing the growing challenges faced by 73% of organizations using outdated tools, as reported by Cisco.
05. Does the Solution Provide Insights into Voice and Video Applications?
Comprehensive NPM tools enable IT teams to effectively manage latency-sensitive voice and video applications. This provides insights into east-west traffic within data centers, helping to quickly identify and resolve network and application issues without extensive forensic analysis.
06. Does the NPM Support Machine-Learning, Advanced Anomaly Detection & Correlation?
Modern solutions should utilize machine learning for dynamic baselining, anomaly detection from big data, and performance corrections, while analyzing data for root causes, proactive health metrics, and capacity issues to prevent downtime.
07. Is the Solution Utilizing Advanced Analytics and Reporting?
It should offer comprehensive analytics for multi-dimensional reporting, custom baselining, and trend analysis across all network domains, enhancing security monitoring, predicting problems, optimizing networks, and distinguishing between genuine and false alerts.
08. Does the Solution Assist with Capacity Planning?
Effective capacity planning is essential to balance between under-provisioning, which causes congestion and poor user experience, and overprovisioning, which leads to unnecessary capital expenditure, requiring a solution that provides comprehensive visibility for optimal resource allocation.
Since performance problems are usually grounded in capacity, capacity planning and network performance management best practices have significant overlap. These features are critical for any NPM solution to have to support capacity planning:
- Service Level Management
- Network and Application Analysis
- Baselining and Trending
- Exception Management
- QoS Management
09. Does the Solution Incorporate AIOps?
Implementing AIOps offers intelligent insights for automation and improved collaboration, enabling faster resolution of IT issues with reduced errors, leading to benefits like lower MTTR, modernized IT departments, and a shift towards predictive management, all supported by machine learning for performance optimization.
10. Can the Solution Provide Scalable, Enterprise Support?
It’s crucial for large-scale enterprises to choose NPM platforms that can handle extensive device networks and adapt to growth, including monitoring diverse environments like SD-WAN and cloud, while aiding in capacity planning to manage resource allocation effectively.
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Checklist for Choosing Network Performance Management Solutions
About LiveAction®
LiveAction provides end-to-end visibility of network and application performance from a single pane of glass. We provide enterprises with confidence that the network is meeting business objectives, full network visibility for better decisions, and reduced cost to operate the network.
