Your Customer Shouldn’t Be the Canary in a Coal Mine

If a customer is the one who tells you something is wrong with your network or applications, you’re already too late. That might sound a bit harsh, but in my opinion, customers should never be the ones alerting you to a problem. All too often, organizations start the remediation clock ticking the moment a trouble ticket opens. But let’s face it, by then the damage is already well underway.

The real work should start much earlier, long before customers even think about worrying.

If You’re Reactive, You’re Already Losing the Race

The traditional way problems were dealt with often started with a customer complaint, followed by a scramble to find the cause. Half the time, the trouble had already stopped before anyone identified the problem. What’s worse, the evidence had evaporated, and the root cause remained a mystery until the problem recurred. For obvious reasons, this wasn’t the best way to solve network and application problems.

Fortunately, addressing these issues has evolved from a reactive approach to a proactive one. Of course, being predictive is more challenging and requires much greater visibility. You cannot get ahead of a problem that you cannot see forming.

When an organization gains end-to-end visibility into its environment, teams can spot issues before they become full-blown problems. For example, they can flag increased latency on an application in one region, or a traffic pattern that wasn’t there the previous week. Maybe the culprit is a link, a server, a load balancer, or a firewall. Armed with this early-warning information, and with tangible evidence in hand, it becomes possible to act quickly and decisively.

The Potential Consequences of Latency

Network and application latency can be more than simply a bother for customers. It can have real-life consequences. The healthcare industry is one such example. HL7 is the standard that moves clinical information across a hospital network. When latency creeps into that traffic, the risk stops being an abstraction and takes on real-world implications. Perhaps a doctor is waiting on the imaging she needs before a life-saving procedure. Or maybe a nurse can’t pull up a record that confirms the right medication at the right dose. Each of these moments ties back to a patient’s well-being, the hospital’s revenue, and the hospital’s level of trust within the community it serves.

Gaining Insights Is Half the Battle

Having the visibility you need into your environment is just the beginning. Catching a problem early is only as effective as the measures taken to address it. When an early signal reaches your organization, who owns it? Have you settled, ahead of time, who gets told, how fast, and what clears the bar for proactive action? It’s important to remember that for every warning there is a customer on the other end of it, someone whose experience is degrading while the alert sits unread.

Deciding when to take action is just as important as identifying the problem. Sometimes a signal looks minor. That raises the question: Should your team investigate or ignore it? Some anomalies really are inconsequential. Others are the first faint sign of something that reaches your customer in a month. This is where customer success is determined, long before anyone opens a ticket. The real work is the discipline and diligence that keeps your customer from ever being the one to tell you something broke.

Knowledge Is Power

Everything I have described rests on the quality of the data underneath it and on a team whose view is wide enough to see trouble coming. At NETSCOUT, we help organizations become proactive. Our engineers, who watch customer environments around the clock, carry what they learn from one assignment to the next. Seeing across many customers and many industries at once, they often spot a technology stumbling in one place before it stumbles anywhere else. A problem caught at one deployment becomes protection for the rest.

By seeing across any service, any cloud, any network, and any application with NETSCOUT Smart Data, NETSCOUT is able to reveal how users are truly behaving in context. This is key to acting on issues before the customer tells you there’s a problem. It turns reactive firefighting into proactive care and carries an enterprise toward the predictive future it has been reaching for all along.

Learn more about how managed IT services can provide 24/7 proactive monitoring, service, and data insights.