Why Reactive IT Is Becoming a Thing of the Past
Solving problems and putting out fires is becoming the legacy version of IT (and network troubleshooting tools need to catch up).
The operating principle is now real-time and predictive solutions, systems not using those are facing a yet-to-be-determined end of support. The IEEE notes in a conference paper that IT professionals in training need a network monitoring system that provides comprehensive, real-time visibility and which can be readily adapted as requirements evolve.
Network Troubleshooting Tools Need to Know Before Users Notice
When a complaint comes in about anything related to the network, that usually means there's been a problem for some time. That's minutes or even hours that the issue has blocked or slowed things down. And now it has to be dealt with right away.
But you can be proactive. With the right tools, you can often detect the early signals of an issue before it produces a noticeable effect on end-user performance.
Many monitoring systems can be configured to alert that there is a problem, but you’re still stuck trying to determine what caused the problem, and where it occurred. This process may take hours, days or weeks to get to the root-cause of the issue.
Another Consideration: The Human Element of Simpler Solutions, Workload and Stress Management
Reducing incoming complaints about network performance, by preventing them or dealing with them in real time, will alleviate the default stress level in your department. This approach is also a helpful long view for hiring and retaining top IT talent at all seniority levels.
Basic Tools Are (Only) the Starting Point
Most monitoring systems will ping things. Latency is affected, and you already knew that: one small part of the problem is identified. Great. There needs to be more than that.
Basic tools will also collect some utilization graphs on critical links which gives you some idea if there's heavy loading on an interface and if that's repeating. That's a little better. Still, these are the bare essentials for network troubleshooting tools.
It's very hard to be out in front of a problem if the only data is 1) it's affecting latency and 2) it's happened more than once.
Preventing the Effect by Addressing the Cause Before Effects Happen
GPS is brilliantly effective when it warns us about a traffic jam: it's aware of an entire large-scale system in real time.
By knowing ahead of time that there is a traffic jam, you know the cause of the problem before the effects happen. GPS telling you you're in a traffic jam after you've been stuck for five minutes is not helpful.
And the manual, trial-and-error method to troubleshoot network problems really is like crawling forward, inch-by-inch, in the traffic jam.
Manual Trial and Error
Manual efforts to troubleshoot network problems, the plodding trial-and-error, are the bane of most IT desks. Unclogging the traffic jam can take hours, days or longer. And networks are not getting smaller and simpler.
Handling a network with a few hundred devices on it is enough of a challenge, and a large enterprise system can run over 100,000. Even more surprising, some of those devices might be unseen, barely visible, not responding properly or particularly hard to protect.
Medium or larger problems usually mean pulling senior IT off of major operations so they can be the detective, sorting through fragmentary clues for the root cause.
Root Cause Identified with TotalView Network Troubleshooting Tools
What if everything your network equipment knows was collected and correlated? It can be done with PathSolution’s TotalView.
TotalView looks at the countless moving parts, all at once, and sends the information through its heuristics engine. By reckoning the millions of "if-thens" at once, you get the plain English accounting of what's wrong and where. And you can get it in real-time.
