The Growing Importance of Packet-Based Performance Management

As work goes remote, deep packet inspection offers much-needed observability.

Woman in datacenter holding laptop
NETSCOUT

With a growing reliance on remote operations, today’s enterprise IT teams face considerable challenges ensuring that network and application performance meets the needs of these disbursed facilities and personnel.

For instance, healthcare providers and their patients must be able to rely on the performance of telehealth services, remote access to patient data, and medical equipment—whether in a hospital setting, an emergency vehicle, or a satellite clinic. Similarly, in the case of the energy industry, operators must be able to monitor remote substations and transmission facilities to assure power distribution and detect disruptions when they occur. They also need to be able to connect in real time with service trucks and field employees to ensure timely response and repairs.

A further example can be found with banks, which must ensure network performance across branch networks and ATM machines to assure reliable transaction processing and to stay compliant with stringent regulatory requirements. These are just a few examples of how remote operations are putting pressure on IT teams to keep networks and applications running at peak performance.

The key to achieving this critical objective is observability. The more enterprises rely on remote operations, the more complex networks become, making such observability more difficult. This complexity is compounded as organizations increasingly rely on a mix of on-prem, colocation, cloud platform, and remote-site connectivity. As a result, the need for robust instrumentation and deep packet inspection (DPI)—a technique for analyzing the data in each network packet for security and performance insights that can fill in visibility gaps and help to assure network and application performance of remote operations—is essential.

Packets Offer an Unparalleled Window into Network and Application Performance

Network packets can be monitored for a variety of use cases, including network performance management and network security. The packets themselves are a multibyte unit of data transmitted at one time by a host, such as a server, on a network. The versatility and detail of packet data allow for unmatched visibility into an organization’s network, revealing the root cause of performance issues. These insights are invaluable for IT teams, who are tasked with fixing problems and keeping the network up and running.

DPI is a form of data processing that inspects the actual data traffic being sent over an organization’s network. DPI and analysis are used to baseline application behavior, analyze network traffic, troubleshoot network performance, and assure that data is in the correct format. Using packets for continuous performance monitoring is essential for delivering high-quality, positive user experiences no matter where those users are accessing the network and applications.

Remote Operations Benefit from Packet-Based Performance Management

For enterprises that rely on remote operations, DPI, when executed at scale, empowers IT teams to gain a detailed view into the operational health of remote-site connectivity. Packet-based performance management is the key to assuring that network and applications are capable of delivering optimized work experiences. DPI at scale and in-depth Smart Data analysis is at the heart of NETSCOUT’s Visibility Without Borders platform. This enables IT teams to investigate and decipher the root cause of challenging network and application issues.

As businesses increasingly rely on remote operations powered by highly complex networks, IT has the critically important task of ensuring that connectivity and performance is assured. Holistic visibility and insight into the network, applications, servers, and user communities is essential to addressing issues quickly, reducing mean time to resolve (MTTR). Packet-based performance management is the answer.

Enterprises would be well-served to engage in a thorough network assessment to reveal visibility gaps. NETSCOUT can provide a personalized observability strategy.

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