Partner Article

Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Visibility?

Every day, many of us commuters have visibility issues and are at the mercy of unpredictable traffic. Often I have to leave a LOT of buffer to get to work in case I had an important meeting. Luckily there are tools out there that can give me good traffic visibility at my fingertips. For instance, I rely almost entirely on Google Maps to “predict” how long is it going to take me to get to work or to any other place for that matter. This type of visibility is crucial when things go wrong, like an accident. Google Maps would reroute me or at least give me a revised ETA so that I can make any adjustments.

Fix Before You Fail

Is there an analogy to this in the online world? You would think that service providers and large enterprises would have this level of visibility into their networks. So, when things go wrong, like a device failure, they can pin point the root cause right away and take corrective action. Better yet, they can be ahead of the game by watching any performance bottlenecks or warning signs of failures and fix the issues before the end users are affected.

BT Broadband Network Outage is a Lesson for SMBs

So, when the very large BT broadband network went down, I wonder if there is such a thing as too much visibility. Despite the service provider level of visibility they have, it took BT almost two hours to get all their customers back on line. Now imagine if you were an SMB or a mid-sized organization faced with a similar outage. Without sufficient visibility into the problem, your network could be down for hours, costing you, your employees, and customers, significantly in terms of revenues, productivity, and reputation.

How can today’s SMBs get service provider level visibility that won’t break the bank? Here are some pointers:

• Invest in a network monitoring tool that can discover all of your critical infrastructure
• Make sure that the tool can provide insight into availability, performance, and security of your infrastructure
• Choose a tool that is broad enough to support multiple monitoring technologies (e.g. SNMP, WMI, network flows) your entire infrastructure (network devices, servers, wireless devices, applications, virtual machines, etc.)
• Ensure that the tool can give you proactive insights as well as reactive alerts
• Consider the total cost of ownership of the tool from when you deploy it to as you maintain it. Remember that DIY is not always free over the lifetime of owning the tool
• Do not “under monitor” during the evaluation of the tool. Develop a monitoring configuration that reflects the entire production network, not just the subset suitable during the evaluation

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ipswitch .