Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

There is one scene in the 2003 blockbuster film “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” that never fails to fill me with awe. As the forces of the Dark Lord Sauron move towards their bloody siege of the Gondor capital, Minas Tirith, the hobbit Pippin lights the beacon fire.

Network operations teams are under constant pressure to ensure optimal performance and availability. But in today's complex network environments, gaining a clear picture of what's happening is difficult. Without a reliable method of collecting performance metrics across your most critical connections, identifying the root cause of slowdowns or outages becomes a frustrating and time-consuming process.

Today, a strong network forms the backbone of business success, making network visibility crucial. As modern networks continue their rapid evolution, it's essential to have an observability solution that is robust, resilient, and scalable. Teams need a solution that helps them enhance network performance and improve user experiences. They need a solution that enables them to confidently face current and future network operations challenges. Network Observability by Broadcom is that solution.

Enabling accurate exchange of information between key applications has become crucial in today’s hybrid and complex IT operations. When we speak with potential customers, one common question we hear is, “How easy is it to consume and integrate the insights generated by Network Observability by Broadcom?” This might sound like table stakes, but it is often a challenge due to siloed teams, the high levels of expertise required, different data formats, and time-consuming processes.

To unlock the power of observability and advanced analytics of AIOps, teams need to collect exceptional monitoring data, establish connections and correlations between the data, and understand context with the help of robust and current topological maps. Because modern networks often span on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, monitoring their performance and troubleshooting issues can be difficult. These complex infrastructures often lead to observability gaps for network teams.

In recent years, the move to SD-WAN technologies like VeloCloud has been both rapid and widespread. While the use of SD-WAN has yielded benefits, one EMA report revealed that only 38% of respondents said their SD-WAN deployments were fully successful.

For teams in many organizations, the work of IT and network management keeps getting more difficult. A recent EMA survey offers some findings that clearly illustrate this point. When respondents were asked which networking skills are the most difficult to find, several roles received a response of 30% or more, including network security, network monitoring and troubleshooting, and data center networking.

We recently worked on an RFP for a customer whose primary driver was compliance with the new Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) regulations. The project aimed to make financial services more reliable and secure, protecting both consumers and the technology provider. Helping with this RFP was a rewarding learning experience due to this effort’s high priority and the key challenges faced by this organization.

As organizations modernize their IT infrastructure with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), ensuring seamless workload and application mobility becomes critical. One often overlooked yet critical factor in this transformation is the quality of the networks connecting data centers and cloud environments. This is especially challenging in environments dependent on internet service providers (ISPs) and other external networks, where internal network operations teams have limited control over network behavior.