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NetOps: A Key Element for Every Enterprise

Clayton Dukes

You've heard of DevOps and SecOps, but NetOps?

NetOps is a natural progression of legacy Network Operations to foster more efficient and resilient infrastructures through automation and intelligence. NetOps provides enhanced operational awareness and a dramatic reduction in Mean Time To Restore (MTTR) during outages.

When the network is down or degraded, that's when the stress begins for Network Operations teams. NetOps provides the means to detect and remediate network issues as they happen, in real time.

The efficacy of NetOps personnel is reliant upon understanding five key elements of a NetOps Platform and how to best utilize and implement each:

1. Service Assurance

Until recently, it was not possible to keep up with the massive amount of data generated from so many disparate sources of information. This led to Network Management Architectures which contained multiple silos of information making it almost impossible to correlate and enrich data because teams could only see part of the picture and sometimes had no visibility at all into service affecting issues. Bringing your entire infrastructure's telemetry under management in one place provides the ability to quickly identify actionable events.

2. Service Automation

Many of today's network teams are still manually remediating issues because they either 1) don't have the mechanisms to automate it, or 2) they don't realize that it can be automated.

When given the ability to have real-time remediation, the scenarios can be potentially endless, therefore, any problem that can workflow a solution should be automated. This automation allows NetOps to construct a trigger that can automatically execute and resolve problems in real-time before anyone knows there was an issue and removes the need for repetitive tasks which eliminates human error.

3. Event Enrichment

When making informed decisions about what to do during the automation process, event enrichment is used to add a layer of intelligence to information about affected devices. When an event comes into a NetOps system, having the ability to modify the payload, add tags, go to other sources of information and look up details such as device location, SLAs, Change Control policies, contact information or anything else that can be used to further group and identify the affected entity greatly reduces the time needed to investigate and correlate service impacting events.

4. Extensibility and Scale

Being able to scale the platform provides the ability to deal with bursts of event streams when anomalistic behavior occurs. Extensibility allows for extraction and tracking of arbitrary data from incoming events (device types, users, locations, failed login names, IP sources/destination ports, GeoIP tracking, etc.) and provides greater visibility for operational awareness.

5. Agnostic Functions

NetOps are capable of ingesting data from any vendor hardware or software messaging platform which can be used to reap the benefits of automatically identifying actionable events, real-time automatic remediation, and assured availability. Agnostic functionality allows for different areas of the organization to utilize a platform without concern for operational effectiveness. Being able to provide operations insight, coupled with automatic remediation and event enrichment frees up engineering staff to do their job instead of repairing known, repeatable, processes.

If you can link automation of the network to all the interdependent steps of application and service delivery, you have the potential for radical change regarding how IT and networks operate and how users will experience services.

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Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

NetOps: A Key Element for Every Enterprise

Clayton Dukes

You've heard of DevOps and SecOps, but NetOps?

NetOps is a natural progression of legacy Network Operations to foster more efficient and resilient infrastructures through automation and intelligence. NetOps provides enhanced operational awareness and a dramatic reduction in Mean Time To Restore (MTTR) during outages.

When the network is down or degraded, that's when the stress begins for Network Operations teams. NetOps provides the means to detect and remediate network issues as they happen, in real time.

The efficacy of NetOps personnel is reliant upon understanding five key elements of a NetOps Platform and how to best utilize and implement each:

1. Service Assurance

Until recently, it was not possible to keep up with the massive amount of data generated from so many disparate sources of information. This led to Network Management Architectures which contained multiple silos of information making it almost impossible to correlate and enrich data because teams could only see part of the picture and sometimes had no visibility at all into service affecting issues. Bringing your entire infrastructure's telemetry under management in one place provides the ability to quickly identify actionable events.

2. Service Automation

Many of today's network teams are still manually remediating issues because they either 1) don't have the mechanisms to automate it, or 2) they don't realize that it can be automated.

When given the ability to have real-time remediation, the scenarios can be potentially endless, therefore, any problem that can workflow a solution should be automated. This automation allows NetOps to construct a trigger that can automatically execute and resolve problems in real-time before anyone knows there was an issue and removes the need for repetitive tasks which eliminates human error.

3. Event Enrichment

When making informed decisions about what to do during the automation process, event enrichment is used to add a layer of intelligence to information about affected devices. When an event comes into a NetOps system, having the ability to modify the payload, add tags, go to other sources of information and look up details such as device location, SLAs, Change Control policies, contact information or anything else that can be used to further group and identify the affected entity greatly reduces the time needed to investigate and correlate service impacting events.

4. Extensibility and Scale

Being able to scale the platform provides the ability to deal with bursts of event streams when anomalistic behavior occurs. Extensibility allows for extraction and tracking of arbitrary data from incoming events (device types, users, locations, failed login names, IP sources/destination ports, GeoIP tracking, etc.) and provides greater visibility for operational awareness.

5. Agnostic Functions

NetOps are capable of ingesting data from any vendor hardware or software messaging platform which can be used to reap the benefits of automatically identifying actionable events, real-time automatic remediation, and assured availability. Agnostic functionality allows for different areas of the organization to utilize a platform without concern for operational effectiveness. Being able to provide operations insight, coupled with automatic remediation and event enrichment frees up engineering staff to do their job instead of repairing known, repeatable, processes.

If you can link automation of the network to all the interdependent steps of application and service delivery, you have the potential for radical change regarding how IT and networks operate and how users will experience services.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...