It is estimated that about two-thirds of all people need glasses, contacts, or surgery to correct their vision. That means most people reading this, just like me, cannot find their cell phone in the morning unless it is right next to their bed. But what if you cannot find your glasses or put your contacts in, the phone is still lost, and you have no idea where to look for it?
The lack of proper vision coupled with a lack of knowledge about where you left your phone means your communications problem will continue to persist. The same is true in the cloud. Finding the true source of a cloud performance or security problem is nearly impossible without comprehensive visibility that gives you de facto 20/20 vision to find where and what the problem is so it can be fixed right away.
The Power of Packets
NETSCOUT Director of Product Marketing Ray Krug and Principal Solutions Engineer Patrick Blais share compelling facts and expert opinions on the need for the right kind of visibility in cloud environments in a discussion entitled “Solving Cloud Performance and Security Problems with Comprehensive Visibility,” part of our Problem Solvers Series. Krug and Blais explain how, but more importantly, why, cloud visibility is essential for quickly identifying the root cause of availability, performance, and cybersecurity problems impacting your cloud-enabled services and applications.
They both emphasize the power of packet-level visibility for cloud performance monitoring to understand highly complex problems and identify the root causes of those problems rapidly. Packets are the most granular data source available. Packets enable consistent management of multiple domains using unimpeachable information. Packets are uniquely versatile for both resolving cloud performance issues and detecting security issues when used in combination with other security tools. The interactions between users and applications are through packets—and packets do not and cannot lie.
Krug and Blais also share some behind-the-scenes integration work between the leading cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and the collaboration with NETSCOUT to ensure cloud applications are highly available, elastic, and resilient and remain cost-effective to deliver expected ROI. Yet because of the breadth and depth of the metrics we can share, nobody needs to view a packet—unless they want to—and NetOps, DevOps, and SecOps professionals often get what they need by feeding our metrics into their dashboard of choice so they can then quickly solve the problem.
It is these intelligent workflows and methodologies derived from what NETSCOUT calls Smart Data that enable rapid problem-solving of cloud application availability, performance, and cybersecurity issues. This also enables less friction with stakeholders and providers because you are communicating with facts and not opinions. It eliminates the finger-pointing and defensive postures that often arise in cloud environments as issues negatively impact services, and nobody knows who owns the resolution.
You Must Find It to Fix It
I was originally shocked to hear Krug, and Blais agree that problem-solving is not all that hard in cloud environments: It is problem finding that is the hard part, they posit, but once you find the problem, fixing it is relatively easy. Given the entire discussion series is called the “Problem Solvers Series,” I seriously thought for a moment that we had a naming problem—no pun intended.
However, once their insight marinated a bit, I realized that a name change was not needed. They just articulated a reality that most of us know, but few know how to articulate. Namely, that you can’t fix what you can’t see. Seeing leads to knowing what needs fixing and where—so it is still all about problem-solving.
See what I mean?
Join Krug and Blais in “Solving Cloud Performance and Security Problems with Comprehensive Visibility,” part of our Problem Solvers Series.