Networking

3 Ways SMBs Can Enhance Network Observability and Prevent Downtime

Small to medium-sized businesses are struggling to manage data spread across multiple clouds, but AIOps can help.

Joel Keller spent more than a decade in IT before becoming a full-time journalist. He has written for The New York Times, Parade and others.

IT staffs at small businesses are overwhelmed. Their data infrastructures are growing harder to manage, particularly as data spreads across multiple clouds. And the sheer amount of data, such as logs, that must be observed is becoming too much for IT personnel to handle.

Less observability also means more cyberattacks and longer downtimes. That’s why the ability to observe and analyze networks in real time is so important. However, that is becoming more difficult for human eyes and brains to do on their own.

Dynatrace’s The State of Observability 2024 report found that the average multicloud environment spanned 12 different platforms and services. These included large-scale cloud providers, local Infrastructure as a Service providers and private servers. 84% percent of technology leaders surveyed said that complexity made it more difficult to protect their infrastructures from attacks.

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This kind of environment creates an overwhelming amount of data to parse. “The costs of storing the increased volumes of this data over the long term have begun to overshadow the value organizations can unlock from querying it,” the report notes. “As a result, teams are often forced to decide which logs to retain for real-time analytics and which to discard or archive in lower-cost, less-accessible storage. This hinders organizations’ ability to drive more automation and smarter decision making.”

To manage these ever-increasing needs, IT leaders are making observability a more automated process and considering AIOps, giving security staff only the information they need to keep their data infrastructure safe.

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Deploy Comprehensive Network Monitoring Tools

Network monitoring suites such as Cisco ThousandEyes or SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor can offer IT staff a look at device health, potential bottlenecks and traffic patterns. This approach gives network managers the opportunity to see if anomalous traffic is the result of a cyberattack.

These products give security staff insight into their networks on a granular level, across both cloud and on-premises environments. These tools will also give a visual layout of the network, deploy artificial intelligence (AI) to help optimize resources and allow administrators to proactively isolate and cut off suspicious activity.

Generative AI assistants are the key to democratizing observability domain knowledge. The ability to ask questions in natural language unlocks a completely new layer of insights and intelligence.”

Hao Yang Vice President and Head of Artificial Intelligence, Splunk

Use AI-Driven Predictive Analytics To Prevent Failures

Solutions such as Splunk and VMware’s vRealize can offer network managers an AIOps route to break through the noise of information and provide predictive analytics to help staff predict weak points before failures happen.

These are probabilistic and training-based solutions that can help teams analyze patterns, according to Dynatrace.

Causal AI is also useful in these instances because it reveals cause-and-effect relationships with the data it analyzes. Predictive AI does exactly what the name describes: It predicts trends or outcomes that might happen in the future.

“Generative AI assistants are the key to democratizing observability domain knowledge,” notes Hao Yang, Splunk’s vice president and head of AI, in the Splunk report. “The ability to ask questions in natural language unlocks a completely new layer of insights and intelligence.”

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Use AIOps to Consolidate Data From Various Sources

If all of the data that needs to be analyzed is centralized using management systems such as Cisco Catalyst Center or Aruba Central, then less time and resources must be spent on coordinating between different teams and projects.

“In organizations with immature observability practices, figuring out where an issue is coming from involves putting everyone in a war room. Putting hundreds of people on a conference bridge is a really bad way to solve problems, and leading teams are finding ways to rise above that,” notes Annette Sheppard, Splunk’s director of product marketing for AIOps, in the report.

Splunk estimates that leaders in observability have an annual ROI of 2.67x what they've spent, citing improvements in problem detection time. Combined with the AIOps and network monitoring tools described above, data management systems can help IT staff cut through the mountains of data that can be generated by systems spread out over a diverse infrastructure.

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