Cisco Cisco Prime Infrastructure 1.3 White Paper

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Managing Networks Today:

Network Management Megatrends 2014 Research Highlights

Executive Summary

The increasingly critical role that IT plays in enabling business is driving renewed focus on the network,

which provides the essential connectivity between customers and end users and the datacenters hosting

applications and services, as well as within those data centers. But establishing and maintaining the

upper hand in ensuring highly reliable, high-performing networks means that network managers and

operators need to keep up with new technology introductions while ensuring that they are using the

best tools, technologies, and practices at all times. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) published

“Managing Networks in the Age of Cloud, SDN, and Big Data: Network Management Megatrends

2014,” a landmark study documenting the latest needs and requirements for excellence in network

management. This paper reviews several key findings and recommendations.

Finding: Root Causes Are Many and Varied

Understanding the root causes of performance degradations is often difficult because so many

contributing factors can come into play, from the application itself to back-end data systems to general

network congestion. EMA asked research participants what was at the root of their most recent

performance degradation issues. Figure 1 indicates that despite the fact that the top two most common

root causes were networking related, a range of non-networking sources such as servers, security,

application design/health, and end client system or user are prevalent. Part of effective diagnosis and

troubleshooting is triaging to quickly rule out what is not the problem. EMA recommends tools that go

beyond network element views so that all possible root causes can be identified and examined.

43%

42%

37%

33%

32%

26%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Network performance/congestion

Network configuration changes

Server systems (including VMs)

Security systems

Application design/health

End client system or User error

Storage systems

Other (Please specify)

Thinking about your organization's last three difficult performance/degradation issues

(that required collaboration across technology teams), which of the following turned

out to be the primary root cause(s)?

Figure 1. Primary root causes of performance/degradation issues