Partner POV | NETSCOUT Removes IT Visibility Gaps to Assure Performance of Service Enablers

This article was written and contributed by our partner, NETSCOUT.

When today's successful businesses think about high-quality network and application performance, their attention is appropriately aimed at assuring the most important business-critical applications. However, there is a supporting set of services that are necessary for any user, networking device, and/or application to simply operate. These are known as service enablers, and they provide authentication, network privileges, DNS, and other critical ancillary functions.  If overlooked, these services can significantly impact the performance, reliability and ultimately the effectiveness of critical digital services.  Performance visibility for service enablers is a priority to help avoid or quickly rectify issues that might cause a slow-down or an outage that can affect multiple mission-critical applications. Understanding the challenges, benefits, value, use cases, and instrumentation strategies for properly monitoring and managing these service enablers has become a principal stakeholder in the development of a successful digital business strategy.

Introduction

Delivering a high-quality network and application performance experience for users depends upon much more than monitoring the responsiveness of individual applications. More important than many of an organization's business-critical applications themselves are the set of supporting enabling protocols that deliver authentication, network privileges, web access, and other IT and networking functions. These services are better known as service enablers and include Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Lightweight Data Access Protocol (LDAP), Active Directory (AD), and Dynamic Name System (DNS), among others.

Consider some of the services that are often taken for granted in today's digitally transformed world and how efficient operation depends on a few key protocols:

• Email login capability that depends on LDAP
• Active Directory controls employees' authentication and authorization for gaining access to parts of the network and specific application services
• Use of a business's own applications and portals that require on-premises DNS servers
• Internet of things (IoT) devices, such as carts on wheels in healthcare, bar code readers in retail, and robotics in manufacturing, that depend heavily on DHCP

Problems with any of these protocols have the potential to disrupt the operation of, not just one, but several everyday applications. In fact, without these services, the applications that depend on them figuratively fall like a deck of cards (Figure 1). Thus, the importance of these enabling protocols for the streamlined use of so many networked business services means that sophisticated performance management and security is essential to optimize their availability as well as overall network and application health.  It may be surprising to realize there is significant IT spending on these critical and essential services. For instance, the DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (IPAM) market was worth approximately $410 million in 2021 and is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 16% to reach over $1020 million by 2027. Proving the importance of normal network and application operation, as well as to the investment value of enabling new services, ensuring operational quality and maintaining availability which has become critical to any business.

Challenges

The application servers responsible for handling end-user connections to a particular service are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the elements required to provide the data and ancillary functions required for successful operation. It is easy to concentrate on the front-end and incorrectly attribute poor performance to this tier of a service if there is no visibility into the "hidden" layers. Figure 1 illustrates this concept and gives examples of some of the service enablers that provide support for multiple user-facing applications. Service Enabler functions can be distributed throughout the enterprise, but usually the shared functions are centralized in a single data center and those that are specific to groups of services are placed as close as possible to those users. For example, Active Directory functions serve the whole enterprise whereas a specific data store may only be required for a single front-end application.  Digital transformation has accelerated the rate of deployment and adoption of new services and applications in the enterprise, for both employees and customers. Increasingly these services are not a monolithic solution containing all the elements required to function standalone. They assume supporting services exist and have standard integration interfaces to access the required supporting capabilities. This also suits the enterprise, as they can standardize these elements and reduce the overlap and repeated functionality. This means that the importance of these supporting functions is elevated. However, this is not always reflected in the monitoring of their health and performance.

Employees, customers, and end users experiencing problems that involve service enablers may experience some of the following issues:

• Employees aren't authorized to log into the corporate network or colocation data centers
• Staff can't access cloud-services or SaaS / UCaaS services
• Employees and partners may not be able to get into corporate intranets or customer portals
• Employees may suddenly be denied privileges to use applications they have been using for years

Application delivery has never been more complicated, which means issues involving service enablers need to be avoided entirely or resolved quickly. Triaging issues to the correct subset of the delivery infrastructure is one of the most crucial functions of a monitoring solution and dedicated instrumentation for each of those subsets is the practical solution. 

Use Cases, Deployment Strategies, and Value

Table 1 below lists the visibility gaps that may be present in a representative service deployment architecture, as shown in Figure 3. It is not possible to represent all the potential deployment environments, but the value of adding performance management visibility for service enablers is consistent and does not rely on the specific location of the required instrumentation. 

We have shown two instrumentation locations in Figure 3, but the on-premises services may be distributed and therefore require more instrumentation instances. We have shown them in a single location because the value statement required to justify additional instrumentation deployments are the same.

When considering how and where to gain the necessary visibility for which protocol or enabling service, Table 1 (shown overleaf) is a good resource. Below is a list of the specific service enablers' visibility gaps along with potential strategic instrumentation locations and value of nGeniusONE® visibility. The numbers in brackets in the instrumentation column are shown in Figure 3 (shown overleaf).

All of the digital transformation initiatives that IT organizations around the world are implementing rely on the pristine performance of service enablers. Degradations and outages in these vital protocols impact access and performance of the majority of applications the business depends on. Vendor-independent, deep packet inspection at scale using the nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution provides the analysis, troubleshooting workflows, and single pane of glass views necessary to dramatically reduce mean time to restoration (MTTR) when problems do emerge. In fact, the nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution has been independently proven to reduce the MTTR of incidents by 80%.

Gap Analysis

Monitoring and analysis of service enablers can be complicated and challenging, particularly to assure performance, availability, and security throughout a distributed infrastructure environment. To determine how best to add visibility, IT teams can perform a self-audit on their environment.  Here are some basic questions to help understand the types of issues being experienced by your end users, where those reports may be coming from, and how to effectively address troubleshooting and resolving performance issues affecting the service enablers that support your users and application environment.

1. What problems recently have involved performance of enabling services like DNS, LDAP, AD, or DHCP? What was the impact on employees, productivity, customers, and your business?
2. How did your IT organization isolate the problem(s) and how long did it take?
3. What enabling services are located in the private data center, colocation data center, and/or cloud? Are these services centralized in one or a few places or localized around the world?
4. Where are your existing network and application visibility points, and how is your ability to monitor performance around your front-end applications and services?
5. Is there a shared CRM/ERM system required to direct or determine the correct responses from customer-facing applications in use in your environment? This may not be collocated with the front-end applications and may currently lack sufficient monitoring to help when troubleshooting is required.  

Visibility into the enabling services essential for network communications is critical for any organization. Regular self-audits help to ensure as digital transformations have been undertaken, that all the protocol dependencies necessary for applications to perform are being monitored and analyzed for the success of all your digital projects.

Case Study Brief

As a leader in network and application performance monitoring and security solutions, NETSCOUT® has been supporting some of the world's largest and most complex enterprises, government agencies, and service providers for years. When a large casino was having issues impacting their slot machines, revenue and customer service were at risk. The IT team quickly realized they lacked the visibility necessary to troubleshoot a web-based application used by the slot machines to operate. Read the case study and learn more about how this organization addressed their visibility challenges and assured the availability and uptime of their revenue-impacting slot machines using the nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution.

Summary

Delivering flawless performance for business-critical applications is no small effort, particularly when you consider the many digital transformation projects underway at any company today. When slowdowns and outages impact productivity, revenue, and customer service, visibility into all the application dependencies for those applications, including enabling services, is essential to pinpoint the true root cause and reduce MTTR. With large, distributed infrastructures and several third-party vendor partners involved, troubleshooting performance problems of any kind using point tools can be time consuming and ineffective. IT teams require end-through-end visibility and analysis of the applications and all their service enablers for troubleshooting success. 

The NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution has a proven track record in monitoring virtually any application in any environment, including the enabling protocols they depend on to operate. Monitoring and performance management of enabling services helps eliminate visibility gaps across your network and application ecosystem.