Who’s Watching Over Your Network and Applications After Hours?

Round-the-clock proactive managed monitoring services never stop troubleshooting, so IT pros can get a good night’s sleep.

Who’s Watching Over Your Network and Applications After Hours?
Tracy Steele

IT professionals typically are some of the hardest-working people in any given organization. They are often the unsung heroes that keep all the systems up and running. But even IT pros have to sleep, and that’s when problems can turn into nightmares. Even when on duty, a recent survey revealed, 38 percent of IT and networking professionals were not always the first to identify network performance issues. This means that end users are the first to experience and report a problem, providing details necessary for IT to begin addressing the issues.

The same report found that 35 percent of IT pros indicated they lack adequate visibility into performance across the entire network. And 34 percent stated that the inability to analyze historical data is a challenge when dealing with recurring or complex network issues.

Failure Waits for No One!

Working 10, 12, or even 16 hours a day, five days a week isn’t an unusual schedule for IT organizations. Unfortunately, as more and more workforces have adopted work-from-home postures, and reliance on network connectivity and business applications has become greater than ever, IT is under increased pressure to ensure systems are operating without fail—day or night.

Issues occurring in the middle of the night, over weekends, or during holidays become a ticking time bomb waiting to wreak havoc on users when they start their work day. Problems occurring during uncovered periods may go unnoticed while IT staff are away from the office. For example, should a failure occur after hours at a company with its headquarters based on the West Coast, when employees show up to work on the East Coast the next morning, they will run into system problems first thing. And IT won’t be there to address it, creating a delay in when issues will be resolved. The implications to the business could be significant.

The Value of “Follow the Sun” 24/7/365 Monitoring and Testing

Proactive, managed monitoring services offer IT a way to monitor, service-triage, and gain critical data insights into business, industry, voice, video, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) application performance issues at any time of the day or night.

NETSCOUT Visibility as a Service (VaaS) offers a “follow the sun” model that effectively keeps a watchful eye on a company’s infrastructure, even when IT personnel are not in the office. NETSCOUT VaaS can provide coverage and expertise 24/7/365, introducing another set of eyes and ears looking for and initiating troubleshooting as soon as issues appear.

Once problems are detected, rapid investigation proceeds, so problems can be pinpointed, IT can be advised, and corrective actions can be initiated. In many cases, this can be accomplished before employees start their day, completely avoiding any resulting impact to corporate productivity. At the same time, this reduces the burden on IT resources, because no one has to be assigned the graveyard shift to monitor systems overnight or on weekends.

NETSCOUT VaaS managed support offers several practical advantages as well. Not having to hire and train multiple after-hours/holiday staff reduces costs. For example, two fully trained IT personnel generally cost a total of $400,000 ($200,000 each) per year, and typically require coverage for paid time off. Having skilled experts analyzing data from NETSCOUT’s service assurance solutions 24 hours a day, seven days a week assures quality application and network performance in a cost-effective manner.

NETSCOUT is an expert when it comes to Visibility as a Service. NETSCOUT’S VaaS works with NETSCOUT products, such as nGeniusONE, InfiniStreamNG, nGeniusPULSE, nPoints, nGenius Packet Flow Switches, Omnis Cyber Investigator, and Smart Edge Monitoring solutions, helping to cut mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and speed up mean time to repair (MTTR).

As one insurance company described the experience with NETSCOUT VaaS, “They are willing to jump on many late-night calls as we work through product lifecycle management and upgrades and help drive them to completion. Having VaaS for helping with staff augmentation is crucial.”

To learn more about how NETSCOUT VaaS can support your proactive monitoring 24/7/365, visit https://www.netscout.com/solutions/netscout-visibility