The Art of Zen and Network Monitoring

The latest episode of the podcast is all about network monitoring.

Most of the enterprises we interview are running dozens or more SaaS applications. And most of our WAN Manager Survey respondents have moved their data centers off-premises—the majority are connecting to multiple IaaS providers. Further, enterprises are increasingly more likely to piece together networks from multiple vendors.

This means we're seeing a more diverse underlay to orchestrate and manage. And a key to the successful management of such includes visibility into and monitoring of the network.

Greg is joined by Kentik Co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman to discuss just that. They talk about the history of network monitoring, where it's going, and get a little philosophical in the process.

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Key Takeaways

The modern network environment is complex, increasing the need for visibility and monitoring.

Enterprises are increasingly relying on dozens or more SaaS applications, have largely moved their data centers off-premises, connect to multiple infrastructure-as-a-service providers, and piece together networks from many vendors, creating a diverse underlay.

This diversity, including technologies like cloud, MPLS, SASE/SD-WAN, and network-as-a-service, makes facilitating network management and orchestration challenging.

Consequently, the need for visibility and monitoring into the network is considered key to managing this complexity, aiming to replicate or surpass the visibility level previously available in a constrained data center environment.

Network monitoring platforms are evolving to ingest telemetry from a wider variety of sources.

While historically data came primarily from routers and switches via protocols, the modern landscape requires incorporating data from cloud environments, performance tests, host agents, and even service mesh traffic.

There is a growing emphasis on application-specific visibility and performance.

This requires better integration and collaboration across network, security, and application teams.

Users and service providers alike are focused on the performance of specific applications like Office 365, rather than just network connection points. Achieving this requires integrating data and workflows across different domains—network, security, and application operations.