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What is Network Visibility for APM and NPM?

Keith Bromley

Most everyone in IT has heard about network performance monitoring (NPM) and application performance monitoring (APM) tools. But what are the real benefits? For instance, what kind of information do I really get and is it worth the investment? Also, what about the complexity involved with these types of solutions?

The answer boils down to implementation. Essentially, did you install a visibility architecture first (so that you can optimize the flow of information to APM and NPM tools), or did you just add point solutions for APM and NPM? This answer will determine the effectiveness of your application monitoring solutions.

Any performance monitoring solution is only as good as the quality of data feeding the tools

The visibility architecture concept is extremely important because it organizes the flow of information to security and monitoring tools. Without it, you don’t know what the quality and integrity of the input data to the tools is. A visibility architecture delivers an end-to-end infrastructure which enables physical and virtual network, application, and security visibility. Specifically, network packet brokers can be included in the architecture to parse the requisite data needed and distribute that data to one or more application monitoring tools.

Once the network packet brokers are installed, it makes it much easier for the APM and NPM solutions to optimize your performance. In addition to these tools, other capabilities, like application intelligence and proactive network monitoring, can be installed as part of the visibility architecture to further increase the range of capabilities.

Here are some example use cases of what you can accomplish when a visibility architecture is combined with performance monitoring tools:

■ NPM solutions can be used to improve the quality of service (QoS) on the network and optimize the network service level agreement (SLA) performance.

■ APM solutions can be used to improve quality of experience (QoE) and optimize SLA performance for network applications, i.e. capture data that can be used by an APM tool to observe and diagnose application slowness.

■ APM tools can be used to analyze user behaviors.

■ Application intelligence can be used to identify slow or underperforming applications and network bottlenecks.

■ Proactive monitoring can be used to provide better and faster network rollouts by pre-testing the network with synthetic traffic to understand how it performs against either specific application traffic or a combination of traffic types.

■ Proactive troubleshooting can be combined with application intelligence to help you more quickly anticipate where network and application problems may be coming from.

■ It is also possible to prevent applications from overloading the network bandwidth by using application intelligence to “see” application growth on the bandwidth in real-time and prevent catastrophic events.

■ You can also conduct inline network performance monitoring to optimize A/B traffic route flows (i.e. investigate path latency and performance problems)

In the end, any performance monitoring solution is only as good as the quality of data feeding the tools. Extraneous and duplicate data will affect the ability and speed of monitoring tools to come to an accurate analysis. A few minutes of time to understand your network visibility and the types of blind you have might be well worth it.

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What is Network Visibility for APM and NPM?

Keith Bromley

Most everyone in IT has heard about network performance monitoring (NPM) and application performance monitoring (APM) tools. But what are the real benefits? For instance, what kind of information do I really get and is it worth the investment? Also, what about the complexity involved with these types of solutions?

The answer boils down to implementation. Essentially, did you install a visibility architecture first (so that you can optimize the flow of information to APM and NPM tools), or did you just add point solutions for APM and NPM? This answer will determine the effectiveness of your application monitoring solutions.

Any performance monitoring solution is only as good as the quality of data feeding the tools

The visibility architecture concept is extremely important because it organizes the flow of information to security and monitoring tools. Without it, you don’t know what the quality and integrity of the input data to the tools is. A visibility architecture delivers an end-to-end infrastructure which enables physical and virtual network, application, and security visibility. Specifically, network packet brokers can be included in the architecture to parse the requisite data needed and distribute that data to one or more application monitoring tools.

Once the network packet brokers are installed, it makes it much easier for the APM and NPM solutions to optimize your performance. In addition to these tools, other capabilities, like application intelligence and proactive network monitoring, can be installed as part of the visibility architecture to further increase the range of capabilities.

Here are some example use cases of what you can accomplish when a visibility architecture is combined with performance monitoring tools:

■ NPM solutions can be used to improve the quality of service (QoS) on the network and optimize the network service level agreement (SLA) performance.

■ APM solutions can be used to improve quality of experience (QoE) and optimize SLA performance for network applications, i.e. capture data that can be used by an APM tool to observe and diagnose application slowness.

■ APM tools can be used to analyze user behaviors.

■ Application intelligence can be used to identify slow or underperforming applications and network bottlenecks.

■ Proactive monitoring can be used to provide better and faster network rollouts by pre-testing the network with synthetic traffic to understand how it performs against either specific application traffic or a combination of traffic types.

■ Proactive troubleshooting can be combined with application intelligence to help you more quickly anticipate where network and application problems may be coming from.

■ It is also possible to prevent applications from overloading the network bandwidth by using application intelligence to “see” application growth on the bandwidth in real-time and prevent catastrophic events.

■ You can also conduct inline network performance monitoring to optimize A/B traffic route flows (i.e. investigate path latency and performance problems)

In the end, any performance monitoring solution is only as good as the quality of data feeding the tools. Extraneous and duplicate data will affect the ability and speed of monitoring tools to come to an accurate analysis. A few minutes of time to understand your network visibility and the types of blind you have might be well worth it.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

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 ...