siliconindia | | DECEMBER 202219every one of those requests and fulfill them through an artificial intelligence (AI) engine. That way, if you put in a request and approval is needed, it's automatically routed to your manager -- who simply needs to say "yes" or "no" before the action is autonomously fulfilled on the back end. Instead of taking days, it'll take hours or minutes. It's a real game changer. It's going to require everyone in IT to tackle things differently, automate a lot of stuff, and essentially turn us all into software engineers.What are some of the most common challenges you've experienced with network monitoring and maintaining consistent quality of service?The biggest challenge with network monitoring is trying to go beyond the basics. We are emerging from a place where we were very human-driven, relying on our outsourced partner to manually monitor and react to each switch, each router, and each circuit in our global network. To scale our growth, we've moved this in-house and begun automating. We want our systems and tools to inform us when there's an issue and, ideally, self-correct if they can. It's been hard enough to set up the basic, automated up / down tracking, but I really want to go beyond that. I want to measure performance at the raw level -- like throughput, megabits per second, or latency -- and measure the real user experience. The other challenge is filtering out the noise, like false alarms. Now that we've moved past the human approach to a systems-based approach to monitoring, you have to get things configured properly. Otherwise, you can easily drown in meaningless alerts -- and have to revert to people making sense of all the data that's coming in.In your opinion, how do synthetic monitoring tools fit into a NetOps tool stack? Do they work well in concert with more passive tools, like packet-fed application and network performance management platforms?Synthetic monitoring tools are where an organization needs to be. You want to get to the stage where you can really see the true user experience, but you need to make sure you have your basic table stakes monitoring in place first. Network monitoring is a stack, and synthetic monitoring tools are the next layer up. If you don't have a solid foundation -- like your basic monitoring of availability, for example -- who cares? You've got to get the basics right first and then implement synthetic monitoring for insights on user experience.The challenge I see with synthetic monitoring tools is our new work-from-anywhere / cloud-connect-to-anywhere mode. As employees, we might be accessing systems on our corporate network, such as our data center, or maybe it's in a lab environment or systems in a manufacturing line. We might also need to access something in the cloud or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. But then you take your laptop, leave the office, and need to work from home for a while. Instrumenting synthetic monitoring there gets tricky because you need it on the endpoints. That's what users are taking whenever they connect to access things on the corporate network, in the public cloud, or through SaaS applications. The one constant is the endpoint. You need monitoring beyond your corporate network if you really want full resolution into the user experience. For example, when everyone was working from home last year, we were fielding lots of escalations about individual applications not performing well. But the problem wasn't our network -- it was employees' internet service providers (ISPs) or home Wi-Fi. One time, we were trying to play a video in an important virtual meeting, and it started glitching and freezing up. We'd tested it multiple times, but it turns out the person who was trying to play the video had suffered an internet outage in their neighborhood right at the same time. That's the real challenge right there. Even as we go back into the office, I think the idea of working anywhere is here to stay. So how can we DAN KRANTZ, Chief Information Officer
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