Combine Network Intelligence with Application Intelligence: A key to successful digital transformation

Around same time couple of years back I was attending a CIO roundtable, and almost all of the IT leaders flaunted with their ideas and vision of digital transformation. I remember having 2 components critically common across: Cloud and Applications. For sometime I tried to carry the impression that we have fully understood and utilised cloud potential, I will accept that I was grossly wrong. And it is not only because cloud has evolved like anything, but also as Internet and to be honest, even now, most of us have undermined this component big time.

It is true that to achieve quicker turnaround, IT looked at "shifting left" and cloud, along with other agile methods, helped. But what they did not consider enough, is the role of Internet in digital adoption.

End users, who were equipped with faster data connections, required not only features and quick response times, but also they needed to heard. IT leaders, who fared well in "shifting left", somehow didn't do enough to ensure latter. Result: most, when unsatisfied with any of these, would silently leave, or will go on to social vocal places and throw.

Somehow most of the tool sets which help understand applications and end-user experience, only limit themselves to fault domain isolation, and don't provide intelligence required to analyse applications from 360 degree. Some provide amazing capabilities of coverage of technologies, and some speed of execution, but no one, other than AppDynamics offer end to end application intelligence, not limiting to technical or execution excellences, but also going beyond and combing business metrics.

Internet is a living organism, and while most of the user experiences depend on it, it isn't controller by a single person or organisation. That, while is good, puts lot of risk of digital transformation projects. Thus, the need for Network Intelligence in an Unpredictable Internet is absolutely mandatory.

Now bring the cloud, which consumes mostly Internet, and backbone for any digital transformation. The real problem is that traditional network monitoring was built for networks, apps and services that are internally owned and controlled, and not for cloud. Despite being useful data, it is simply not available from the Internet, including all the providers on which businesses rely. That’s where Network Intelligence comes into play. Network Intelligence refers to the data, technology, algorithms and techniques used to collect, analyze and visualize network information for the globally connected, digital world.

The purpose of Network Intelligence is to optimize digital experiences everywhere, by understanding global network topologies, dependencies and behavior, and to support better IT decision making.

Traditional tools, whether APM or NPM, they don't integrate other than providing some event based combined dashboards. To be honest, they don't understand each other. While APM heavily depends upon user experience, NPM still is IT tool CFOs don't want to spend on. Understandably right, NPMs don't deliver values other than just a toolkit.

If APM works well, will be able to help with understanding fault domains, and will wash-off hands if that is network. And if NPM works well, and hypothetically integrated with APM (which I haven't seen much) will get you some tracks if that is in the data center and only related to device faults. Beyond this, you may need to get packet sniffing, flow analytics or other traffic costly solutions to understand further. That too, only within data center. But now you have cloud, and SaaS, and multiple DCs, and MPLS. How will you combine both applications and networks now? Can you still say you have "shifted left"?

With award winning Network Intelligence technology from ThousandEyes, and world's #1 Application Intelligence platform from AppDynamics, you have ability to:

• Compare network and application performance for defined business transactions across multiple systems and cloud, and service providers
• Monitor and predict availability of critical network and application resources
• Actively monitor for Internet and cloud (hybrid, multi-cloud) for blind spots, issues that are impacting user experiences

Wrapping it, with one key take away, Combine Network Intelligence with Application Intelligence to "Shift Left" in monitoring, otherwise your digital transformation may not yield the same benefits you may have envisaged.