Modern dashboards for network performance monitoring do a great job of reporting status and statistics. In general, these dashboards provide views of aggregated information that make them useful when looking for historical data or trends. But when there is a problem on your network, these dashboards often fall short in providing real-time, actionable information about individual network trouble areas.
What no company in the industry has done well is create dashboards that help network engineers troubleshoot. Not only are better dashboards absolutely necessary, I believe they’re completely within reach. As an industry, we need more discussion about what data is truly meaningful in this context and how we can obtain it.
One of the limiting factors is that meaningful, real-time analytics from individual data points cap out at around 2 Gbps. At that point, we reach the limits of our computational processing power. Real troubleshooting requires analysis of network data at the speed of the network itself.
The problem
There are six characteristics common to all of our dashboards today. They excel at baselining, but miss the mark when helping network engineers quickly identify problems.
It would be more useful to see a list of the network flows together with a list of specific problems. For example, where is the network encountering too many TCP retransmissions, and who’s being affected by them? If you can immediately see where the problem areas are, you’ll be able to resolve them much more efficiently.
Most dashboards get their results from NetFlow data or similar data collected by network devices. The weakness with this approach is that it doesn’t provide access to the data as it’s happening, so we can’t pivot on the data to see what’s actually going on in the network itself as it happens.
Here are a few things our dashboards should be capable of:
The best way to sum it up is that we need a better way to see the worst things happening on our network, right now: The worst TCP quality, network or application latency, VoIP MOS scores, and where FTP traffic polices are being broken. NPM dashboards have their place, but the industry seems ripe for change. We need a "crashboard" that provides actionable data on the worst parts of our network, not just another dashboard.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
