What is Network Observability?

Network observability refers to the ability to gain deep, actionable insights into the state and performance of a network. Unlike traditional monitoring, which merely identifies when and where issues occur, network observability reveals why these problems happen, enabling faster diagnosis and resolution. This proactive approach helps ensure a resilient and efficient network infrastructure.

What are the benefits of implementing network observability?

In today’s world of interconnected, hybrid, and cloud-native networks, ensuring optimal network performance and uptime is more critical than ever. Network observability offers several key benefits:

• Minimize downtime: Quickly identify root causes to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and minimize impact on users and business operations.
• Optimize network performance: Allocate resources effectively with comprehensive visibility, to improve network speed, efficiency, and reliability.
• Harden security posture: Detect and respond to potential threats early by analyzing network traffic and behaviors.
• Proactively resolve issues: Easily anticipate and address potential problems before they impact operations.
• Facilitate collaboration: Break down silos and allow for cooperative troubleshooting when sharing insights across teams.
• Improve compliance management: Meet regulatory documentation requirements easily, with comprehensive logging and auditing capabilities.
• Streamline IT operations: Automate network management tasks to free up resources and increase efficiency.
• Enhance user experience: Provide a better experience for users with optimal network performance.

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What are the key components of network observability?

Network observability goes beyond simple monitoring by analyzing various network data sources and change-events to provide context and actionable insights. Key components include:

• Change monitoring: Observability requires real-time tracking of network changes, such as configuration updates and software patches, to understand their impact on performance.
• Topology mapping: Visual representations of the network, and how its components are connected across your cloud and off-cloud infrastructure, help identify issues and what dependencies are affected.
• Performance analysis: Continuously measure performance metrics across network segments to identify bottlenecks and potential points of failure.

Network observability is especially valuable when it correlates change-events with performance data, enabling IT teams to determine not just what happened but why it occurred and how it can be resolved.

To achieve true network observability, organizations should focus on solutions that provide:

• Real-time change tracking: Continuously updated insights into network configuration and status changes.
• Integrated topology mapping: Up-to-date visualizations that reflect current network conditions.
• Proactive diagnostics to link change-events with network performance to accelerate root-cause analysis (RCA).

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What is the difference between DevOps observability and network observability?

DevOps observability focuses on metrics, logs, and traces to monitor application performance and behavior, helping DevOps teams troubleshoot software issues. Learn more about observability.

Network observability provides insights into network health and performance, analyzing data flows and connectivity across physical, virtual, and cloud environments to identify and resolve network issues.

Learn how OpenText’s network management solutions can help you implement robust network observability practices.

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How does network observability differ from traditional network monitoring?

While network monitoring identifies symptoms of network issues, network observability goes deeper to provide context and reasons for them. Monitoring tools alert teams to a performance drop, but observability tools answer crucial questions such as:

• What changed in the network?
• Why did the issue occur?
• How can the issue be fixed?

This deeper understanding enables IT teams to shift from reactive to proactive management, preventing issues before they disrupt operations.

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What role does AI and machine learning play in network observability?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are transforming network observability:

Anomaly detection: AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of network data to identify unusual patterns or behaviors that might indicate performance issues or security threats. This allows for faster detection of problems, which might be missed by traditional, threshold-based monitoring.

Predictive analytics: Machine learning models can forecast network performance trends, helping organizations proactively address potential issues before they impact users or business operations.

Automated root cause analysis: AI-powered observability tools can automatically correlate events across different network layers and components, significantly speeding up the process of identifying root causes of complex issues.

Intelligent alerting: Machine-learning algorithms can learn from historical data to reduce alert fatigue by suppressing false positives and prioritizing the most critical issues.

Explore how OpenText AI and analytics solutions enhance network observability with advanced AI and ML capabilities.

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How does network observability contribute to network security?

Network observability plays a crucial role in enhancing an organization's network security posture:

Compliance and auditing: Comprehensive logging and auditing capabilities within network observability solutions help organizations meet regulatory requirements and industry standards, providing the necessary data for security audits.

Behavioral analysis: Advanced network observability tools can establish baselines for normal network behavior and alert security teams when deviations occur, indicating potential security breaches.

Network segmentation validation: Observability tools can help verify that network segmentation policies are working as intended, a crucial aspect of implementing a zero-trust security model.

What challenges might organizations face implementing network observability?

Adopting comprehensive network observability can come with its own set of challenges:

• Complexity: Modern network infrastructures can span physical, virtual, and cloud-based environments. Ensuring visibility across them is essential but can be difficult without the right tools.
• Scalability: As organizations grow, so do their networks. Network observability solutions must scale efficiently to support large and complex environments without degrading performance.
• Security and compliance: Observability must also include robust security measures to detect vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with industry regulations.
• Data overload: Collecting data is easy, but making sense of vast amounts of information to derive actionable insight requires smart filtering and analysis capabilities.

To overcome these challenges, organizations can:

• Start with a phased approach, focusing on critical areas of the network first.
• Invest in training and development for IT staff to build necessary skills.
• Choose observability solutions that easily integrate with existing tools.
• Carefully evaluate the total cost of ownership for observability solutions and consider cloud-based options with more flexible pricing.
• Implement strong data governance policies and leverage observability tools with built-in compliance features.

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Industry-leading Network Observability solutions from OpenText™

OpenText offers a suite of network management solutions that provide comprehensive network observability. These solutions help organizations gain deep visibility into their network infrastructure, enabling them to proactively identify and resolve performance issues, optimize network operations, and enhance overall network health.

• OpenText Network™ Operations Management delivers powerful observability features, including real-time change monitoring and dynamic topology updates.
• OpenText™ Core Cloud Network Observability offers visibility into public cloud and hybrid connections, helping IT teams proactively manage and troubleshoot network performance.

With these solutions, organizations can achieve end-to-end observability, ensuring their networks remain reliable, secure, and high performing.