In today’s complex, distributed environments, quickly and accurately identifying the source of issues remains a massive technological and operational challenge. Enterprises require a more pervasive visibility across their ever-expanding application landscapes — what we now call observability — to monitor not just their own front- and back-end performance but also identify root causes in realms outside the traditional tech stack.
That’s where network monitoring comes in. This invaluable solution expands observability and enables ITOps teams to separate application performance issues from network or internet-related incidents that increasingly impact business results. It’s part of what we call full-stack business observability, and it’s more important than ever. Here’s how network monitoring software can benefit your organization.
The benefits of implementing a network monitoring system
“While most organizations are powerless to respond to third-party connectivity issues, [network and application monitoring together] provide a roadmap for resolving performance and connectivity issues inside and outside of our network quickly, thoroughly, and proactively to keep our whole environment running at peak performance.”
– Hari Vittal, Senior Engineer at FICO
Like AppDynamics customer FICO, most organizations that deploy network monitoring immediately realize its value to the business. But what drives this value, and how can it help your organization achieve its short- and long-term goals?
Here are some of the immediate benefits you can expect from implementing a network monitoring solution:
- Reduce mean time to isolation (MTTI) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents directly impacting customer experience and revenue. With a network monitoring system in place, you’ll be able to proactively monitor the internet and third-party service providers (from APIs to cloud-based services) that your organization doesn’t directly control. By correlating these metrics with application and business performance data, your teams can focus on the issues most impacting key business results with broad observability of the entire digital experience.
- Make service-level agreements (SLAs) and/or operational-level agreements (OLAs) more achievable for your teams and eliminate the blame game. Collaboration is key to delivering the best digital experience for your customers, and by including network monitoring as a part of your overall performance monitoring solution, traditionally siloed teams like AppOps and NetOps stay connected around a common objective. With access to insights that immediately pinpoint the source of an error, your teams waste less time deciphering and blaming and stay a step ahead of every issue — no matter the location.
- Improve employee productivity, transparency and satisfaction while supporting your remote workforces by observing data from third-party SaaS applications. Say goodbye to SaaS-related support tickets and delayed SaaS projects. Ensure that your employees, both remote and on-site, get the same attention and experience you provide your customers. By increasing their productivity and transparency, you’ll bolster the morale and reputation of your IT teams while helping prevent shadow IT projects that can create security risks, fostering a healthier environment for your whole organization. Troubleshoot all popular SaaS applications such as Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and/or Office 365 at the application level along with hop-by-hop internet metrics from user devices, data centers and branch offices.
ThousandEyes gives you insights into SaaS applications your employees use
What is full-stack observability?
Full-stack observability is a way of identifying and interpreting data within the entire technological landscape across which your business operates. It’s much more than just a robust monitoring platform — it involves pulling vast amounts of information from an ever-expanding ecosystem of cloud providers and external networks and making sense of it. It means getting to the ‘why’ behind every issue, not just the what, so that organizations can better understand context and develop a proactive vs. reactive mindset.
How network monitoring creates a new layer of observability
Without intelligent external alerts, ISP or third-party platform failures, application teams often must argue their innocence when in fact the issue may have everything to do with the networks rather than the applications themselves. Network monitoring solves this all-too-common pain by accurately identifying network-related incidents, alleviating frustration and allowing them to perform at a higher level. With reliance on the public internet at an all-time high, organizations need a truly borderless observability solution that inspires confidence and the willingness to take swift, collaborative, results-driven action on any dependency within AppOps or NetOps.
AppDynamics network visibility identifies the root cause of performance issues in the application or the network
AppDynamics + ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence: The bridge to full-stack observability
As a critical layer of the AppDynamics Business Observability Platform, ThousandEyes, the industry’s leading internet and cloud intelligence platform, provides extensive insight into the external services that most organizations don’t directly control. It is the industry’s first and only solution to offer such insights in the context of the entire tech stack that makes up the back end of business operations.
AppDynamics Dash Studio, our custom data visualization and dashboarding software, now includes ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence, making it that much simpler to visualize this crucial data in one easy-to-read interface. AppDynamics + ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence goes beyond just collecting metrics, distributed traces and logs to break open a new layer of observability, ingesting crucial external data that organizations will increasingly rely on in order to provide optimal digital experiences.
From the first touch to the final purchase, deploying a network monitoring solution means you’re taking a significant step further towards delighting your customers, your employees and everyone who interacts with your business.
Check out our network monitoring and observability resources below for a deeper dive, or reach out to one of our experts and schedule a demo or get started with a free trial today.
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