Today's networks are driving more digital change than ever before, which is putting increased pressure on those responsible for deploying, monitoring and maintaining them. As a result, there's a premium on actionable real-time visibility into networks and application performance issues.

NetOps teams are now expected to proactively identify problems before they impact the organization, and if problems do arise, to solve them in real time to minimize the effects on the end user. The goal is to provide actionable network transaction-based monitoring, rapid root-cause analysis and integrated packet-level forensics in a single solution, so teams can quickly identify latency, communication and capacity issues.

However, extracting insight from the flood of information traveling through today's high-speed networks is a constant challenge faced by those responsible for network performance and reliability. Statistical summaries and aggregated data are traditionally just a starting point for further investigation into problems. And historically, packet data has not scaled for high-speed real-time monitoring. As a result, a new breed of solution has been born that simultaneously provides the precision of packet-based analytics with the speed of flow-based monitoring (at a reasonable cost).

The end result is actionable visibility, which helps teams focus on the biggest problem areas, which essentially requires four elements.

First, the data must be acquired from wire data, a datacenter, the cloud or the edge.

Next, the network and data must be monitored for end-user experience in true real time.

Third, the team must be ready to investigate a problem or issue, from traffic to trace files.

And finally, a certain level of the packet data must be retained so teams can troubleshoot. How can this level of network visibility be put into action?

Here are 6 reasons to use these new NPM/APM analytics solutions:

1. Find out quickly if it's the application or the network

When problems emerge, you need to solve them fast. Understanding if this is an application or a network issue – and having the packet data to back up that claim – is critical to eliminating debates and war room discussions.

For example, see at a glance which transactions on the networks are experiencing the worst network and the worst application latency, from network-wide down to an individual server. When you see application latency that is outside of the norm, a single click can provide the actual packet data comprising the network transaction. This is the best data possible for determining the root cause of the problem. Often times application errors can quickly be identified in the packet payload data.

2. Gain visibility into the line of business

For many companies, the business is the application(s) they run. For example, an online retailer is defined by the performance of the web servers and associated web applications driving the storefront. Visibility into key performance indicators for these specific applications, including network and application latency and transaction quality for each and every transaction, drives real-time response that keeps the storefront running at its maximum potential.

3. Speed to resolution

Every second counts when the network or an application has a problem. Having the ability to navigate fluidly in real-time at up to 35 Gbps of network traffic, and then immediately click through to specific packet data dramatically speeds resolution time. Plus, the less time the network team or IT spends troubleshooting, the more time they can spend on projects to improve the network, like cloud migrations or building data warehouses.

Read 6 Reasons Every NetOps Team Should Use a Packet-Based Analytics Solution - Part 2 for 3 more reasons to use the new NPM/APM analytics solutions.