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Introduction
The current era of distributed work requires delivery of truly borderless digital applications and services powered by the cloud, delivered via a secure network centered on high performance and best in class user experience.
It is essential that your organization has visibility and real-time insights into the data flow across the extended enterprise network as well as the ability to apply the necessary People, Process & Technology safeguards for data in transit and rest. This is mission critical to assure data protection and privacy while complying with regulatory mandates and minimizing enterprise risk.
“Network observability” is a strategic technology enabler to help meet these business needs, minimize enterprise risk, and foster regulatory compliance.
What is network observability?
Network observability enables effective, efficient, and dynamic visibility and visualization, with actionable insights about the network state. It forges a nexus between network operations and cybersecurity to strengthen resilience, reliability, and digital trust for the business mission, user experience, and the enterprise ecosystem.
Data is at the heart of network visibility. Powerful back-end mechanisms such as data lakes and AI facilitate real-time analysis of large-scale varied data sets. Workflows and orchestration render proactive alerts, ease troubleshooting efforts for operational teams, and power continuous improvement via active trend analysis and retrospective data analysis.
Network observability transcends passive monitoring and is a paradigm shift in network and security operations and performance management.
Foundational elements of network observability
The following are foundational elements to enact network observability:
- Telemetry: Focus on data collection from diverse data sources via interoperability to enable real time understanding of network operating state and health.
- Data lakes: Process and analyze context rich telemetry data to accelerate delivery of actionable insights to empower network and security teams’ collaboration and enhance the user experience
- Visibility & visualization: Deliver real time visibility, trend analysis and correlation of historical data to drive network optimization and continuous improvement
- Automation: Initiate AI powered workflows to foster service assurance and facilitate proactive incident management
The value and importance of network observability
Managing network performance and assuring a superior end user experience is paramount for service assurance as end users access private, public, and hybrid cloud applications in a distributed, borderless manner. While the cloud is the hub for application delivery, the modern network is the delivery channel. It is vital and