Is IT Infrastructure Growing Too Fast to Manage?

According to Mordor Intelligence, the IT infrastructure market is expected to grow from $230.11 billion to $433.43 billion by 2030. A strong infrastructure supports expansion, new technologies, virtualization, and growing customer demands. But that same growth often leads to infrastructure sprawl, where operational baselines become misaligned.

One project enables the next one. And that enables two more. Each new application or site requires more time, money, and expertise to manage and secure, while adding more tools with overlapping capabilities. The result is a fragmented ecosystem where visibility is limited and performance and interdependencies are harder to trace. Dashboards centralized at the main data center may show green across the board, but high-level views can be misleading and often miss local issues, which delays mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and creates a false sense of system health.

Simpson’s Paradox Exposes a Hidden Flaw in Performance Dashboards

When infrastructure grows faster than monitoring strategies can adapt, IT teams are often left relying on simplified metrics from centralized dashboards built on incomplete datasets. Simpson’s Paradox is a statistical phenomenon in which a trend visible in aggregate data reverses or disappears when the data is segmented. In simple terms, data that looks fine at a high level can reveal serious problems when broken down by factors such as location, user interaction, or time period.

Remote sites are especially vulnerable. Although they’re typically monitored via centralized tools, those views often miss site-specific issues. Hidden problems often become clear only by way of real-time, packet-level visibility. For example:

• A branch office of a financial services firm shows normal bandwidth usage, but recurring microbursts disrupt performance during peak trading hours.
• Contact center agents at a remote insurance office report VPN slowness, yet dashboards show all clear—while two overloaded load balancers intermittently time out.
• Domain Name System (DNS) performance looks healthy in corporate dashboards, but a misconfigured server at a retail store causes persistent resolution issues.

Metrics, logs, and traces provide valuable signals, but on their own, they often lack the depth needed to fully understand performance issues. Without contextual insights, emerging service degradations may be missed and critical events underprioritized, creating operational risk.

Built to Grow, But Not Built to Work Together

When the network edge expands, so do the challenges of maintaining control. Remote sites often support mission-critical functions such as customer service interactions, transaction processing, and on-site operations. Yet they’re often a weak point or even an afterthought in digital transformation efforts.

With tech stacks shifting toward artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and cloud-native applications, data volumes and system interconnectivity are growing rapidly. This complexity makes it harder for organizations to deliver consistent user experiences and achieve business goals. The smarter technology becomes, the more people expect everything to be “smart.” Yet the root cause of many issues only becomes visible in packet-level data captured in real time at the site, service, and session levels that traditional metrics may overlook.

Tame the Sprawl. Keep the Performance

NETSCOUT helps organizations regain control of complex, distributed environments with real-time, enhanced observability across cloud, data center, and remote infrastructure. By integrating packet-level intelligence, especially in edge locations where metrics, logs, and traces may not be enough, solutions such as NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management, remote InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances, and nGenius edge sensors can help organizations reduce troubleshooting time, avoid misleading aggregates, and prevent digital transformations from turning into more sprawl.
    
Download our ebook “Hidden Gems: Harnessing the Power of the Network to Proactively Ensure Edge Success” to take control of your infrastructure and stay ahead of performance risks.