While doing my typical daily tour around the web for materials pertinent to our key topic areas of network and security monitoring, storage, etc., I came across a great article on SearchNetworking.com that caught my attention. Written by Shamus McGillicuddy (@ShamusTT on Twitter), News Editor and frequent author on the website, the article Network management and monitoring market remains crowded, fragmented discusses a recent market research project commissioned by leading research firm IDC.
The research project was a worldwide network performance and operations management forecast and market share report presented by Abner Germanow, research director for IDC. In case you are not familiar with IDC, they are a leader in custom research projects and they also do recurring analyses of important or growing market segments in the technology space.
Industry Research Supports the Notion of Monitoring Optimization
While the results were no surprise to our team at Anue Systems, the numbers support our notion that you must have some sort of monitoring optimization solution to make sense of the wide range of tools you need to manage. As stated on SearchNetworking.com:
“When you go in and talk to someone in IT about their network management tools, they typically respond with, ‘Well, I use Solarwinds for this and HP Network Node Manager for something else,’ ” Germanow said. “And they don’t view the tasks that are done by those two products as competitive. They are complementary.”
This is an important quote for a number of reasons.
- Not only are there a large number of tools, but there are both competing and complementary solutions for consideration. With each tool addressing different slices of the same problem area, Network Operators must manage an assortment of similar devices to ensure complete and thorough network visibility.
- These findings highlight the pain associated with a shortage of SPANs and TAPs. If the only way to monitor the network appropriately involves the use of a larger number of tools, then it stands to reason that you will need even more network access points to connect all of those tools.
- This study only discusses two areas of monitoring: network performance and operations management. What about security, compliance, or even troubleshooting tools?
This study confirms our suspicions: Network operators are suffering from too many tools and not enough places to connect them to the network. Monitoring optimization fixes this problem while using the most advanced and easy-to-use approach to filtering. But it also attacks the problem of tool cost, helping you use the same number of tools to cover more segments of the network.
You already own plenty of tools just to keep up with all the fragmented needs. With monitoring optimization, you won’t need to buy duplicates just to cover various segments of the network. Don’t settle for point solutions or advanced plumbing devices when what you really need is Monitoring Optimization.
