Pretty much every business these days relies on cloud applications. Those applications of course are delivered across not only your internal network infrastructure, but the internet.
If you are a larger enterprise, this WAN connectivity it likely to be over an SD-WAN overlay. There’s a lot to go wrong with all that, so when your users complain of poor application performance, where do you start?
In this blog, we’re going to walk through the top 3 reasons why you would want to utilise Application Dependency Monitoring.
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What is Application Dependency Monitoring?
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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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Reason 1: Insight
Insight means a faster resolution to issues. If you don’t have deep monitoring on your network all the way to the Application layer, how do you know how good an experience your users – and by implication, your business – is actually getting.
That lack of insight is costing money, in lost productivity with issues you don’t know the root cause on and are very difficult and expensive to isolate and remediate.
Using not only standard monitors, but also synthetic traffic monitors, we can test out the entire OSI stack from an end users laptop – that’s about as deep a level of performance monitoring as you can do.
The ends game is to give us deep insights and to immediately be able to alert when these occur – and of course, take some corrective action.
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Reason 2: Comfort Level
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When you have a lot of moving parts in your network, knowing the network baseline is an important factor in ensuring you have a comfort level that it is operating normally.
The absence of issues is the best time to deploy Application Dependency Monitoring as we can see how the network performs normally and get a few days or weeks or baseline information.
The baseline allows us to configure alerts to provide specific insights into when your network departs from its normal baseline – and this is different for every network.
The image below shows how we have custom integrated our ThousandEyes Application Dependency Monitoring back end into our Jira dashboard. From a customer perspective, this is good news – this is really easy to see that all your services are up and operational within their normal bounds.
This is the comfort level bit – one look at the screen and all is well. When it isn’t – well that’s obvious too – as you can see from the Microsoft issue we are showing below.
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Reason 3: Preventative Maintenance
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The real value we want to bring with Application Dependency Monitoring is for there to be a stable network and application delivery. If we can achieve that, we arrive at a position where ‘silence is golden’. At this stage, we are not expecting to be reporting on too many issues, but in the world of network and application support, a boring, dull day is a good one!
Some customers would view this as the point they no longer need Application Dependency Monitoring, but nothing could be further from the truth. With a stable network it becomes much easier to spot early signs when your network departs from its baseline.
This allows us to take preventative action to try and prevent an issue before it occurs – that means higher uptime for your users.
The image below details what a baseline looks like, along with some alerts we automatically raised in our ticketing system, so the process from an issue arising to get it registered with a person to look into the issue is automatic. This is efficient – it saves time and ensure the subsequent investigation is captured:
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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.
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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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