Is UX Monitoring the future of Network Monitoring?
Is User Experience (UX) monitoring going to be the future of network monitoring? I think that the changing nature of networking is going to mean that our devices can tell us much more about what’s going on. This will change the way we think about network monitoring.
Historically we’ve focused on device & interface stats. Those tell us how our systems are performing, but don't tell us much about the end-user experience. SNMP is great for collecting device & interface counters, but it doesn't say much about the applications.
NetFlow made our lives better by giving us visibility into the traffic mix on the wire. But it couldn't say much about whether the application or the network was the pain point. We need to go deeper into analysing traffic. We've done that with network sniffers, and tools like Solarwinds Quality of Experience help make it accessible. But we could only look at a limited number of points in the network. Typical routers & switches don't look deep into the traffic flows, and can't tell us much.
This is starting to change. The new SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) vendors do deep inspection of application performance. They use this to decide how to steer traffic. This means they’ve got all sorts of statistics on the user experience, and they make this data available via API. So in theory we could also plug this data into our network monitoring systems to see how apps are performing across the network. The trick will be in getting those integrations to work, and making sense of it all.
There are many challenges in making this all work. Right now all the SD-WAN vendors will have their own APIs and data exchange formats. We don't yet have standardised measures of performance either. Voice has MOS, although there are arguments about how valid it is. We don't yet have an equivalent for apps like HTTP or SQL.
Standardising around SNMP took time, and it can still be painful today. But I'm hopeful that we'll figure it out. How would it change the way you look at network monitoring if we could measure the user experience from almost any network device? Will we even be able to make sense of all that data? I sure hope so.
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