Assessing Network Management Challenges

Network Management doesn’t have to be overly complex, but a clear understanding of what needs to be accomplished is important. In a previous blog series I had talked about the need for a tools team to help in this process, a cross functional team may be critical in defining these criteria.

1. Determine What is Important—What is most important to your organization is likely different than that of your peers at other organizations, albeit somewhat similar in certain regards. Monitoring everything isn’t realistic and may not even be valuable if nothing is done with the data that is being collected. Zero in on the key metrics that define success and determine how to best monitor those.
2. Break it Down into Manageable Pieces—Once you’ve determined what is important to the business, break that down into more manageable portions. For example if blazing fast website performance is needed for an eCommerce site, consider dividing this into network, server, services, and application monitoring components.
3. Maintain an Open System—There is nothing worse than being locked into a solution that is inflexible. Leveraging APIs that can tie disparate systems together is critical in today’s IT environments. Strive for a single source of truth for each of your components and exchange that information via vendor integrations or APIs to make the system better as a whole.
4. Invest in Understanding the Reporting—Make the tools work for you, a dashboard is simply not enough. Most of the enterprise tools out there today offer robust reporting capabilities, however these often go unimplemented.
5. Review, Revise, Repeat—Monitoring is rarely a “set and forget” item, it should be in a constant state of improvement, integration, and evaluation to enable better visibility into the environment and the ability to deliver on key business values.