The State of Network Management

We recently put together a report with Ashton, Metzler & Associates, trying to gauge the state of network management today. After our best efforts, we have learned a few things.

For example, the state of network management is not Ohio. That’s the Buckeye State.

After checking the 50 states of the U.S., the six states of Australia, and the 31 Estados of Mexico – even broadening our definition to include Canadian Provinces – we still couldn’t find the state of network management.

Then we thought about surveying more than 300 network engineering, operations, and management professionals about how IT organizations manage application performance.

Here’s what we found out:

• 93 percent of respondents indicated their organization had either formally or informally identified a set of applications that are considered critical to the business. However, only 41 percent of those surveyed indicated that the company’s business managers were involved in identifying the critical applications.
• 75 percent of respondents said identifying the company’s critical applications has led to at least a moderate change in the way they design, manage and troubleshoot the network infrastructure. The most common change cited was implementation or enhancement of quality of service (QoS) policies.
• 80 percent of respondents reported that their IT organization has mapped the supporting network infrastructure components upon which key applications depend. These organizations are far more likely to focus their monitoring efforts either exclusively or primarily on these critical components than the non-critical ones.
• Half of respondents indicated that they measure and report on the mean time to repair (MTTR) for a network or application outage. However, only 30 percent confirmed they actually measure and report on the MTTR for degraded application performance, revealing a continuing legacy of fault and availability management over performance management.

What this means is that we still have a long way to go – that many companies still look at networking problems from a perspective of fault, and not of performance, and that end-users are still likely to notice slow-performing applications before the IT organization.

On the other hand, the good news is that the report shows that IT professionals are focusing more on applications as part of the network, not as a separate discipline.

In “The Mandate for a New Age MOM” Dr. Metzler recommended specific goals IT organizations must meet to effectively manage the network for application performance:

• Discover all applications that are on the network and identify the handful of them that are the most critical to the running of the business.
• Baseline the performance and usage of the company’s primary IT resources – the most important business applications and the components of the IT infrastructure that support those applications.
• Implement tools and processes that allow the IT organization to monitor the key performance metrics (e.g., response time, utilization) of the company’s primary IT resources, and allow the IT organization to quickly respond to a situation once it has impacted the end user.