Mixed Network Hardware Needs Monitoring That Leverages Big Data

To say that small business networking is either elementary or flat is merely misstating the facts. For most small to midsize businesses (SMBs), their connections to the outside world take probably grown at a breakneck pace in contempo years due to irresolute concern processes, employees who have become more connected, and a software deployment model that heavily favors cloud services. Because of this, your company's network has probably get a wilderness of switches, routers, mobile and stationary clients, network-attached storage (NAS) appliances, and servers—many with one or both feet in the cloud.

IT Watch bug art And that's simply your internal network. You lot likely too take a rapidly growing part of your network that's entirely in the deject (cloud services) and also pieces that face the public, typically customers and perchance partners. The task of monitoring the network performance of this many-headed monster increases in complication past orders of magnitude as it grows—to the point where it'south incommunicable for you or your legacy monitoring solution to keep up. And, worse, it grows impossible for the network to do mucgh self-monitoring, since that model commonly tin can't handle heterogeneous equipment. Each network equipment make, type, and standard has its own configuration and management needs and quirks, yet few third-party management platforms tin incorporate or access all of the data to exercise an effective management job.

Fortunately, that'southward where Large Information science can help, which was the mission and motivation for Nyansa to develop its Voyance network monitoring software, and the reason that it's provided as a deject-based service. Voyance takes inputs from wired and wireless networks, cloud services, and in some cases, client agents, to monitor the overall health of your network. According to Voyance, it and then uses its analyses from a vast universe of data from many such networks to determine when there'due south trouble on your network, and in many cases, to spot it proactively.

Spotting the Pattern

For example, allow'south say the Voyance software starts seeing a pattern of issues with a specific wireless connection. It may exist something that other network monitoring packages could also spot, such as repeated instances of higher-than-desired latency on certain wireless pathways. Or it may exist something that other packages might not spot, such as repeated instances of an oversubscribed wide expanse network (WAN) link where the overall connexion is otherwise lightly loaded.

Either way, the Voyance software tin can aid administrators detect the root causes of such problems before they become bigger problems. Y'all might find that a wireless access point is suffering from a previously undiscovered source of interference (perhaps an improperly shielded microwave oven) or an unsuspected connectivity trouble, such as a network link that can't handle height loads.

The reason this is of import is that such bug rarely manifest themselves as connectivity or interference problems. Instead, you'll just hear complaints about boring load times from your deject service or poor performance from your customer service website. Users accept no way of knowing why they are having problem; they merely know their feel isn't what it should be.

Monitoring Network Traffic Details

Co-ordinate to co-founder and CTO Anand Srinivas, the goal of Voyance is to maximize the UX. Voyance does this by monitoring the details most network traffic from a number of sources. This can include packet assay from span ports on network switches and metrics from wireless controllers to syslogs and flow information from your infrastructure.

Each of those metrics tin can reveal of import details well-nigh your network operations, but information technology'due south when taken together that existent significant begins to appear. This is how Voyance leverages its data assay, so uses that analysis to produce recommendations for fixing network issues. What happens is that the software compares your network performance with identified issues on other networks to decide what's really going on.

Voyance presents its data as a total-screen dashboard brandish that provides a graphical overview, amplified past important details beneath the graphics. Those details might include a listing of mobile devices with reduced performance because of poor connectivity, for instance, along with a summary of what appears to exist causing the problem.

Existent Metrics, Real Network

This combination of data can also exist used for more than just fixing bug. It can also validate network changes by providing users with an improved feel or information technology tin show that changes might not have produced the expected comeback. Such metrics are also useful for justifying expenditures or equally backup for upkeep requests. What's important is that Voyance provides real metrics over a real network.

Of course, there are limitations. While Voyance bills itself as not requiring customer agents, the Nyansa does provide client agents to be used under certain circumstances, such as for diagnosing difficult wireless connectedness issues. Only a spokesperson for the company said that such agents are non actually necessary, and that the lack of such agents is a style to keep from having a negative effect on the network.

Voyance is intended for big enterprises consisting of over 100 access points or over 1,000 users. For SMBs, at that place's not a direct alternative. Only in that location are some good network monitoring applications, and I'm looking at those at present for a review roundup that we'll publish soon.