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Application Dependency Monitoring - FAQ

Written by IPTel Solutions | 8 May 2024 4:04:38 AM

The term Full Stack Observability and more specifically Application Dependency Monitoring is a recent concept all around taking your monitoring and analytics to the next level.

Some companies have invested in their monitoring capabilities to this level; however, most don't have the resource availability, skills or knowledge available.

In this blog, we’re going to present some FAQ's from our customers who are new to the FSO Application Dependency Monitoring concept.

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Question 1: What is Application Dependency Monitoring?

Application Dependency Monitoring is all about monitoring the applications that matter most for your business. In doing so, we also monitor the underlying network infrastructure, so you can get alerted to any changes – or importantly, drifts from the normal baseline.

When a key application goes down, a business typically has staff that cannot work and customers that cannot be attended to – and that assumes the business isn’t in a critical service industry where failure of a key application would be catastrophic.

We’ve built a managed service around the concept of Application Dependency Monitoring, because we think this offers our customers a high value service to ensure their network can be quickly diagnosed when issues occur, but just as importantly to provide a reporting dashboard to give comfort that all is running normally.

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Question 2: How do I get Application Dependency Monitoring (ThousandEyes)?

Application Dependency Monitoring is powered by ThousandEyes. 

At IPTel we offer all our customers a POV (Proof of Value) service which is provided to bring a customer visibility and to showcase what Application Dependency Monitoring can provide. 

This POV Service runs for 4 weeks and is a perfect opportunity at very low investment for you to get a real-world example of the service full implemented.

Post-POV conclusion we have a full service debrief to go through the findings and define how we can help your business achieve their goals in the long term.

You can sign up at the bottom of this blog or alternatively call the Sales team who can start the ball rolling.

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Question 3: What are the 'Business Benefits'?

The business benefits to our customers are huge with the below just a summary:

  • Next level insights for when the worse happens on your network both internally, or externally to your ISP and beyond.
  • Clear and reliable data to provide to your internal Application teams when there are issues on your network. Pinpointing a Root Cause quickly is vital to reduce outages, customer annoyance and major network issues.
  • Comparision metrics to use prior, during and post-project work. These should form any Major project work you undertake as part of the success criteria.
  • Help a business create what is a 'Baseline' level of service and what 'Good' looks like. Sounds easy but it's not.
  • Valuable Data to help drive decision making and strategy within an organization. Where you look to invest next as a CIO or decision maker is made a lot easier when you have accurate data to back it up.

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Question 4: What is the Cost?

ThousandEyes works on a per-unit consumption basis. The number of units your network tests consume will dictate the cost to your business.

The tests in ThousandEyes though can be adjusted and manipulated to provide the business benefits you want at the cheapest possible method and that it where we can assist!

A lot of companies don't have the expertise and knowledge to successfully run and manage ThousandEyes testing efficiently and that is where the IPTel Application Dependency Monitoring Managed Service can help.

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Question 5: What Support can I get?

We package our Application Dependency Monitoring offering via a CISCO Powered Managed Service.

Our Offering includes the following base inclusions.

- Implementation & Management of up to 10 tests designed to monitor the critical components of your network and applications

- Document AFOM (Agreed Form of Measure) and Alert & Notification Schema to ensure the correct people are notified at the correct time.

- Weekly Reporting to show how your network and applications are performing

- Quarterly Business Review to run through your test performance and provide metrics for your business to future plan

- We handle the hassle of ThousandEyes Procurement and License Mangement. It is all done for you!

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Summary

Is Application Dependency Monitoring right for your business? The key questions to ask are:

  • Do you rely on key applications for your business operations?
  • How confident are you that they are always operating normally?

That peace of mind, along with regular insights into the state of the network and the application allow you to take preventative measures – helping you keep your critical applications and hence business operations online.

If you're interested to know more, please complete our managed services request form.

Managed Services mean a lot of things to different people. As you can see from this blog, we have built our Managed Service around delivering what's most important for our customers - peace of mind that your network is being looked after.

The managed services proposal allows us to build a service that's right for you. To enable this, we have a range of options in specifying your service. This includes not only X2 but also D3 Meraki Access, D4 Meraki SD-WAN and D6 Cisco Secure Access.

Across these services, we cover your complete Meraki environment, as well as a comprehensive support offering for your Cisco environment. 

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