Faster Enterprise IT Troubleshooting: Start Small and Win Big

“How did we miss that?” 

Even the most experienced CIOs and their teams will find themselves asking that question at some point while troubleshooting root causes of degradations and outages in complex IT environments. 

But there’s an obvious answer.

The more enterprises embrace the cloud or add new on-premises solutions, the harder it is to pinpoint issues across evolving infrastructures without vendor-agnostic visibility of the networks, applications, servers, platforms, and client edges supported by that infrastructure. The answer, simply put, is that if IT organizations can’t “see” emerging problems, they may not be able to quickly resolve them.

Moving Beyond “Something Is Wrong”

In enterprise IT troubleshooting, speed is everything. Still, troubleshooting usually is a multistep process that starts with “something is wrong" and should progress, ideally, toward successful root cause analysis. Scalable enterprises need to routinely assess their environments and key workflows and ensure they eliminate “blind spots” that can leave them exposed to degradations that deteriorate service and business performance. The greater the understanding of the relationship between network behavior and issues affecting customers and end users, the more quickly problems can be resolved or assigned to network or security teams for remediation. Comprehensive visibility is the fastest way to accomplish this goal.

CIOs and their teams are not just managing enterprise environments. They are managing enterprise complexity. Physical and cloud environments, networks, applications, WAN or SD-WAN architectures, collaboration tools, software systems, custom applications, third-party vendors, and so on all provide opportunities for blind spots. In fact, as enterprises get further away from the data center and out to the edge, enterprise IT leaders face infrastructures that they don’t always own or control. All that complexity without visibility can create significant barriers when troubleshooting issues. Brand reputation and the productivity of the business are on the line if disruptions reach customers.

Proactively Mitigating Disruptions

Internet of Things (IoT), unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), software as a service (SaaS), and similar technologies are now integral elements of enterprises’ competitive advantage. Employee and customer experiences are critical to that. For customers and other users, visibility can lead to better reliability, less downtime, and more productive environments. Outside of costs, part of the motivation for digital transformation initiatives—such as migrating from on-premises data centers to public and private clouds and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and SaaS—is the appeal of better customer experiences and services. But in complex enterprise IT environments, everything is connected to everything else. When new applications are added, they become part of that matrix, making end-through-end methods for monitoring infrastructure and application state and identifying and resolving issues even more important.

Visibility into network and application performance goes well beyond simply the collection of logs, metrics, and traces of observability control theory methodologies. To successfully identify and remediate service-impacting issues and lower mean time to repair (MTTR) now and into the future, enterprises need to consistently assess their ecosystems via a wide range of real-time state data and historical metrics, including packet data.

Unlocking Root Cause

To find the root cause of issues and resolve them quickly, IT teams need visibility of the relationship between user experience, IT environment behavior, and underlying network and application issues. NETSCOUT's nGenius Enterprise Performance Management provides borderless, real-time visibility across client edges, granular Smart Data analytics, proactive alerting, health diagnostics reporting, and on-board packet captures into a single source of truth for rapid troubleshooting. In this way, CIOs and their teams gain complete visibility regardless of whether the environment is on-premises, co-located, private or public cloud, or a virtualized network, so they can stop asking, “How did we miss that?”

Learn more about nGenius Enterprise Performance Management and how it helps CIOs and IT teams troubleshoot and resolve issues faster. Download our Fact Sheet.