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Everything is Green but Users are Complaining. What's Your Next Move?

Chris Siakos

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?

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

Everything is Green but Users are Complaining. What's Your Next Move?

Chris Siakos

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?

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...