This is a classic scenario which continues to plague Network, Application and IT leaderships teams. The toolsets tell a good story showing "green" yet the complaints keep coming. Lots of questions, very few answers!
The network team is typically the first to get blamed and the default mode is to prove its innocence. Meanwhile leadership continues to receive complaints, and back and forth troubleshooting communications between network and app teams consume valuable and smart human capital for days. We're all aware of the technical intra-company and inter-company relationship debt that these situations bring with them. Is there sufficient collaboration to make sure everyone is on the same page?
While teams frantically drive towards problem detection, user complaints all of a sudden stop for no apparent reason and life continues until the next performance event. If problem detection drags on for days, users lose faith in the IT organization and stop complaining. How can you analyze data in real-time and win back their confidence?
Many of these challenges stem from loosely inferring user experience levels by looking at network performance (NPMD) tools and cobbling together data from a variety of different tools. Teams are inundated with telemetry data which not only prove pointless for this problem but makes their job even harder. What about the APM or vendor-specific application monitoring tools? Great tools to monitor performance within the application — what about the network and the end users?
Then we have the move to the cloud — Yet Another Tool for Cloud Monitoring? The "swivel chair effect" goes to a whole new level. If you're thinking that there is a gap somewhere which hinders speed to detecting user experience issues then you're right. It's a gap that's about to get bigger.
We call this the "application intelligence" gap. This is the intelligence gap between network, application and cloud which makes performance problem detection very challenging and expensive. When users complain about application experience, what do you do? Is the problem with the network, the application or the cloud?
Detecting and diagnosing end-to-end user experience issues is hard and gets harder with cloud and serverless computing. Establishing the right foundation starts with bringing Network, Application and Cloud teams together on a common framework. A framework that provides operational performance intelligence to show what matters very quickly so teams can detect fast, predict and avoid performance issues and focus on what they do best. Are you ready to break the silos and foster collaboration?
