Running Edge-Heavy Networks? Here’s How Smart Management Tools Can Help

It was over seven years ago when Najam Ahmad, Director of Network Engineering for Facebook spoke at InteropOpens a new window in 2013 and pronounced, “The days of managing networks through protocols and command-line interfaces are long gone. He went on to say, “CLI is dead, it’s over, we want robots running the network and people building the robots.” At the time, he was referring to software-defined networking, but his vision of automated network management applies to today’s enterprises more than ever.

The digital transformation that companies and organizations have undertaken since 2013 has created application dependency workloads that customers and internal users categorically rely on. While enterprises strive for the Holy Grail status of five-nines uptime, latency-sensitive applications require more than mere connectivity. 

Potential bottlenecks need to be identified before they occur. Latency issues have been magnified further by the distributed computing approach of edge computing. As IT estates expand in size, IT architects and engineers have pushed data processing outward to the enterprise’s remote edges, where a growing share of data is being produced. Now compound all of this with the events of last year that catapulted the practice of remote work strategies that extensively scaled the network itself and the mammoth task of management and monitoring.

The New Era of Network Management 

When everything was centrally located within the confines of the data center, management and monitoring was relatively simple (even though it may not have seemed so at the time). As enterprises have grown in complexity, so has the endeavor of managing it all. As networks continue to be redefined, we must redefine network management as well. Gartner definesOpens a new window it as:

Applications designed to isolate and resolve faults on the network, measure and optimize performance, manage the network topology, track resource use over time, initially provision and reconfigure elements, and account for network elements.

There is no place today for manual management processes. For instance, enterprises today utilize containerized platforms that spin up within seconds to execute tasks for only a few minutes before being shut down. These compressed windows of time don’t allow for conventional troubleshooting. Network admins no longer have the luxury of playing detective, sifting through endless logs to find that elusive clue that will point to the culprit of the problem at hand.They also need intelligence-based systems that can provide answers rather than just endless alerts that eventually go ignored by an exhausted IT staff.  

Companies are digitally transforming themselves to attain agility, unrestrained scalability, and greater efficiencies for their enterprises. That’s why it is imperative to utilize cloud-based network management tools that can scale alongside your IT estate, providing flexibility to adapt to networks that continually change. Internal IT must also focus on maximizing the efficiencies of application stacks spread across the expansive enterprise domain. This is achieved by locating and eliminating loops, unnecessary network hops, and duplicate work efforts.

Learn More: Big Cloud, Small Data Centers: Meeting the Network Resilience Needs of 2021 

Why Edge Computing further Complicates Network Managing Efforts

While the cloud still plays a pivotal role within hybrid networks, edge computing plays an important supplementary role.  Within these edge locations, intermediary nodes reside between the edge devices and the cloud in a hierarchical manner.  These nodes either supply processing power, route SaaS traffic to the nearest internet connection or enforce security and network policies.  Because these edge ecospheres support critical workloads, network admins must supervise these environments with the same diligence as the data center.

The main challenge in managing edge computing environments is that, well, they are out there on edge. While edge computing assets may be far from the WAN epicenter, long trip times are only one of the challenges when it comes to management and performance monitoring.  Often, these remote sites may have unstable or limited connectivity.  In these cases, monitoring data should be kept at the edge rather than sent to the WAN and compete with critical workloads for bandwidth.  Erratic connectivity and latency greatly complicate the provisioning and de-provisioning of assets and software patching and updating.  For outdoor edge sites, weather and other conditions beyond human control can affect job schedules, making traffic patterns unpredictable.  

Edge devices perpetually may join and leave these remote environments such as temporary sensors or mobile devices. Poor visibility into these remote areas results in a vast undergrowth of IT that centralized admins are often unaware of.This is where an intelligence-driven management and monitoring system can seek to discover what is truly within these environments. AI-driven processes can then map dependencies between processes, services, and hosts to understand the call relationships between these dependencies.  

Learn More: Want To Achieve Five Nines Uptime? 2 Keys To Maximize Data Center Performance 

Network Management Tools

Having the right tools is essential for network managers today. Here is a list of some of the basics every IT team should consider for the modern enterprise.

Traceroute

Traceroute itself is a basic ICMP tool used to confirm connectivity, identify routing paths and discover latencies through each connected hop. There are many third-party traceroute tools, also referred to as path analyzer applications, available today that provide continuous probing of mission-critical assets and infrastructure nodes.  These toolsets also incorporate other functions as well such as DNS diagnostics. Tests can be stored in log files for analysis.

IP Address Management Software

Even small companies incorporate multiple VLANs today, making IP assignments highly complex. Today’s IP Address Management solutions can integrate with multi-vendor on-prem and cloud-based DHCP and DNS systems to streamline all IP address requests. These solutions provide reporting, troubleshooting, and alert functions to keep your network teams informed of real-time issues and potential problems.

Network Access Control

While security remains a core function of NAC solutions as they perform endpoint assessments to ensure that connected devices meet security and compliance policies, they also provide visibility into what is actually connected to your network. After all, you can’t manage what you can’t see. AI-driven NAC solutions today can probe those blind areas of your network and identify all connected devices.This enhanced visibility can be then backed by automated policy enforcement, reducing the need for manual intervention of both wired and wireless devices. Unauthorized devices can be segmented and even disconnected entirely in the event of an unwanted triggered event.  

Network Performance Monitoring

Advanced network performance monitoring solutions no longer require IT teams to monitor dashboards all day.  These systems use AI to continually analyze network performance metrics across the entire IT and provide intricate dependency mapping to fully understand the order of network processes that occur within the network.  The end goal is to discover potential disruptions and provide immediate automated self-healing. These intelligence-based applications can operate within all types of environments including SDN, SD-WAN, edge computing and hybrid cloud.

Learn More: NetFoundry on Why Zero Trust Networking Is a Business Imperative 

Conclusion

In the coming years, network diagnostic, management and monitoring tools will become more automated. These systems will rely on AI probes and triggered events to proactively address issues without human intervention. This will allow internal IT to focus on innovation creation to develop value-added solutions for their respected organizations.

Do you think automation is key to managing complex networks? Comment below or let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!