Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Polling has been the go-to approach for network monitoring for years, and it still plays an important role in keeping networks healthy. But as networks become more distributed, application-driven, and data-intensive, simply polling devices more often isn't always the most efficient way to gain deeper operational insights. That's where network telemetry comes in.

Every layer of the modern network stack moves at cloud speed. If your connectivity doesn't, your entire strategy can stall. Co-authored by Fabio D’Avino This blog includes insights from Fabio D’Avino, a specialist in Network as a Service (NaaS) with more than seven years of experience researching, designing, and building global network services. Fabio’s work explores how organizations can modernize connectivity as cloud, hybrid, and AI-ready infrastructure strategies evolve.

Network admins want all devices with the same role to behave the same way. But in real environments, that consistency rarely lasts. Imagine two core switches in the same data center. They serve the same function and run the same OS version. One handles traffic without issue, while the other drops packets during peak hours. Logs show nothing obvious. Routing looks correct. The team spends hours checking links, hardware, and traffic paths.

Since 2020, the modern workspace has fundamentally changed, where employees now operate across a mix of office, hybrid and remote locations. Critical systems are now distributed between data centres and public cloud platforms, and most corporate data lives in the cloud. This shift has expanded the attack surface for many businesses.

In the world of enterprise Agile, we face a persistent paradox: How do we empower individual teams to establish their own unique processes, while ensuring leadership maintains a clear, consistent view of the entire organization’s progress? For a long time, the answer was a compromise.

Over 90% of mid-sized and large companies estimate that a single hour of downtime now costs more than $300,000. The clock starts the moment something breaks, whether anyone has noticed it or not. And most outages don't start with alarms. They begin with a small issue inside the network: an overloaded switch, a saturated link, or an unstable interface. Left unnoticed, those small issues grow into user complaints, stalled work, lost revenue, and damaged customer trust.