Smart edge monitoring

NETSCOUT SYSTEMS has introduced NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring to give IT teams complete visibility and insights to assure the highest-quality end-user experience in any network or application regardless of where employees perform their job. By reimagining service assurance for the hybrid enterprise, NETSCOUT is the first to introduce an entirely new, patent-pending architecture that combines smart data analytics with synthetic transaction testing to deliver visibility and support for the end-user experience whether working at home, business offices, or remote locations.

“IT organisations face big decisions in managing and advancing their networks and management approaches, which became even more urgent, during the pandemic on multiple fronts – from operations to optimisation, from resolution to readiness, and from core and cloud to edge and client,” stated Mark Leary, research director, network analytics, IDC. “To address the next normal in network management, ITOps needs to be able to diagnose whether applications, clients, services, or network infrastructure are causing performance problems. Here, it is vital to pinpoint and resolve service degradation issues across any domain rapidly and accurately.”

Smart Edge Monitoring overcomes one of IT’s biggest challenges in problem identification and resolution in complex, multi-vendor environments. Through integrated analysis, the solution quickly understands what the end-user experience is and exactly why issues are occurring. As a result, this unique solution drives significant reductions in time-to-resolution for any application issue, including SaaS, UCaaS, VoIP, video, and data.

Enterprise organisations all have remote locations representing an edge in their network - manufacturing, banking, and retail have factories, branches, and stores - many of which have gaps in visibility when problems occur. Smart Edge Monitoring closes those gaps with flexible, cost-effective alternatives to get the proper analysis in the right edge location for improved end-user experience and problem resolution.

The value of combining the synthetic testing and packet analysis in Smart Edge Monitoring is that emerging problems are detected as early as possible, so IT teams can quickly discover the reason why and pinpoint where they are happening. Although historically, siloed tools might have provided one or the other analysis, Smart Edge Monitoring merges them with integrated analysis and logical workflows that dramatically reduce end-user impact and the time required to solve complex issues. Example use-cases include:

• Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)– When users at home, branch and remote offices, or headquarters are experiencing poor performance on platforms such as Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, Smart Edge Monitoring identifies problems including join-meeting delays and poor audio and video quality.

• Work-from-Home- With a significant percentage of companies operating a hybrid workforce model, Smart Edge Monitoring provides early detection of performance slow-downs with analysis throughout the transaction ecosystem, from home-user network, across the WAN, to data centre, application and database servers, and to cloud and SaaS providers, to quickly pinpoint the problem.

• Cloud- Cloud migrations can have gaps in visibility that lead to performance challenges post-launch. Smart Edge Monitoring baselines the user experience before, during, and after cut-over to cloud-based applications to help mitigate such issues.

“The reality is that the massive shift toward remote work over the past year has exposed fundamental blind spots,” said Michael Szabados, chief operating officer, NETSCOUT. “When performance problems begin to develop for the remote user, our smart data transaction tests act much like a smoke detector alerting of a potential problem, which subsequently can be quickly extinguished with the powerful nGeniusONE service triage workflows.”