As networks continue to change and see new demands, companies are turning to network monitoring tools to optimize network performance. Thanks to technological developments in edge computing, security, open source, and AI, network monitoring tools are delivering more value than ever before, says Mike Huot, principal product strategist at The OpenNMS Group.
Networking at the edge has been growing for some time now, and the pandemic further fueled this trend due to the need to decentralize. At the same time, the data center, whether on-premise or in the cloud, is shrinking in favor of Platform- and Software-as-a-Service. The traditional hub-and-spoke model is being replaced with a more diverse set of connections from the client directly and corporate offices. For the home user, the split-tunneled configuration is more complex, with zero-trust network access (ZTNA) becoming a critical technology replacing traditional client-based VPNs.
What’s Happening at the Edge
The proliferation of IoT/XoT devices in industries, such as health care, will push the need for monitoring closer to wherever the device may be. Limited device resources require monitoring to be external to the device and the service they report to. Depending on the situation, this can be done through passive or active means.
Furthermore, corporate office locations will increasingly need the automation and reduced complexity that SD-WAN offers. SD-WAN will simplify the configuration for direct internet traffic for services like Office 365, SalesForce, and others to provide the best experience for users. Traditional wide-area connections (with their higher costs) will become a smaller part of corporate networks thanks to the flexibility of SD-WAN. This flexibility will make monitoring more critical as validation of the SD-WAN solution’s decisions should be measured, tracked, and verified. Using metrics obtained outside of the solution is the best way to ensure that the users get the best experience from their system.
Zero Trust for Network Monitoring
Compliance and security have always been critical issues, which will continue to hold as computing is pushed to the edge. Companies must deploy solutions independent of the surrounding infrastructure to provide the necessary security for network monitoring. Network monitoring solutions must be fully independent of the infrastructure they’re monitoring to be as secure as possible. Using a zero-trust framework is one way to accomplish this. Expect an uptick in adopting network monitoring solutions based on a zero-trust framework in 2023 and beyond.
It’s also important to note that we have much work to do in defining zero trust. Vendors of these solutions will need to publish some information about what qualifies them as zero trust. Companies are growing more discerning of the vendors they choose to work with and will demand information on the architecture behind any zero-trust solution they’re vetting. I foresee more transparency in proactively sharing this information to win new customers and build greater confidence with existing users. We may even see an agreed-upon definition for zero trust come from this effort.
See More: Microsegmentation: One Step Toward a Zero-Trust Network
Open Source Is as Important as Ever
Open source has become key to innovation and growth for many business strategies. Building a community is now recognized as a way to incubate new ideas and concepts. Open source has long been a cradle for introducing new standards for the industry and more formal standards, such as RFCs. These communities go beyond producing open-source software, expanding into the free exchange of tips, techniques, and tools.
Open source will also continue to play a vital role in making network monitoring solutions better. Network monitoring has become an especially competitive market in the past few years because most companies today are incredibly technology driven and need to optimize their technology investments to reach more customers. Modern enterprises need to know whether they’re getting the best performance and availability out of their implementations. To achieve that, they must closely monitor those solutions. That being said, it’s extremely difficult for any network monitoring vendor to build a solution that covers all the products and technologies that need to be monitored. This is where the open source community brings a breadth of knowledge that no one company can contain—it reaches into the corners to find the next problems that monitoring can solve.
In the past—before open source became what it is today—network monitoring vendors used labs that had physical, service-provider equipment in them to monitor and test their solutions. However, this strategy was very expensive to set up and maintain. It was also limiting in terms of the equipment that could be monitored. Today, these solutions can be tested in the open-source world, allowing network monitoring vendors to get their software out there and into the hands of community members who have just about every piece and piece of equipment. In short, it’s exceptionally hard to build a lab that can emulate a production environment, but the open source community is (and will continue to) provide network monitoring vendors with better feedback on their products coming from a community that is using it in that ecosystem.
See More: 4 Reasons Enterprise CIOs are Adopting Open Source
Where AI Comes In
Companies are constantly seeking new ways to improve the insights they can glean from their network. AI offers great promise in this area. Network monitoring vendors are integrating AI and machine learning algorithms into their products to provide enriched data drawing the connections between the parts to provide a picture of the whole. But one thing on the horizon is a trainable network monitoring solution versus something with already prebuilt algorithms. A trainable solution for network monitoring will empower companies to tailor monitoring and reporting to their specific business needs, not the other way around.
The breadth and depth of this subject necessitate network monitoring vendors to partner with the greater open-source community and collaborate to train an AI that benefits everyone.
As the technology improves, network monitoring will be less reactive and more proactive in surfacing the data before it is asked for. The end game is self-healing, where the monitoring system tells the automation to fix the problem before it’s a problem. This will enable network engineers to focus on designing and optimizing rather than firefighting.
Regardless of what 2023 may hold, one thing will remain the same: Enterprises will always need a reliable way to monitor their network and ensure everything is in order. Thankfully, advances in security, AI, open source, and edge computing will make monitoring tools smarter, more efficient, and more secure than ever.
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