Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I want to challenge a deeply held belief in our industry, one that I once championed myself: the idea that more data is the answer. We've spent a fortune building vast data lakes of network telemetry, believing that if we could just collect everything, we would achieve a state of operational nirvana.

In the spirit of Halloween, let's talk about monsters. Not the kind that hide under your bed, but the ones that live inside your network infrastructure. For those responsible for keeping the lights on, these creatures aren't fictional; they are a daily reality. Your environment can feel like an episode from the Real Ghostbusters, teeming with things that snarl, bite, and cause chaos at the worst possible moments. Forget silver bullets; trying to fight them one by one is a losing battle.

On Monday, October 20th, a significant portion of the digital services we use every day became inaccessible. For hours, banking, communication, and entertainment applications were unavailable. The root cause was later identified as a major outage within Amazon Web Services (AWS), the infrastructure that powers a vast number of online services. The initial response for any business affected by such an event is a frantic effort to diagnose the problem. Is it our application? Is our network down?

There’s a nagging feeling of déjà vu that haunts every network operations leader. You invest significant time and resources to resolve a major performance issue. Your best engineers isolate a culprit—a misbehaving load balancer, perhaps—and after a frantic effort, service is restored. You close the ticket, confident the problem is solved. Then, two weeks later, it’s back.

Since VMware joined Broadcom, there’s been some speculation in the industry about the future of Voyence, VMware's trusted network configuration management (NCM) solution. We want to address that speculation directly and share some exciting news.

In my conversations about managing large, complex networks, one topic is now constant. The issue isn't budgets or new technology; it's about personnel. Specifically, it's the increasing difficulty of finding and retaining skilled professionals. If you are feeling this pressure, you are not alone. The search for technical talent is a universal challenge.

In my last blog, I’ve discussed a common problem: metrics like mean time to resolution (MTTR) mean nothing to business leaders. Celebrating a faster fix for an outage that still cost the company thousands in lost sales is a conversation that goes nowhere. You might as well be speaking a different language.

I’ve been in those late-night "war room" calls where, after hours of painstaking work, the team finally resolves a critical outage. The dashboards all turn green, a collective sigh of relief is shared, and the next day’s report highlights a victory: Mean time to resolution (MTTR) was reduced by 15% compared to the last major incident. It feels like a win.

Today’s enterprise networks are a far cry from the centralized, predictable infrastructures of the past. Instead, they are sprawling, dynamic ecosystems that stretch across cloud services, SaaS applications, on-premises data centers, distributed branches, and thousands of end users connecting from every imaginable location. This complexity creates a huge challenge for IT and network operations teams: How do you get a clear, real-time view of what’s really happening?