The following blog post is by Steve Brown, the director of product marketing for Network Instruments, a business unit of JDSU.

The management of IT resources has changed significantly over the past several years. With the implementation of cloud, unified communications (UC), and Big Data initiatives, locating the source of application or service delivery issues has become increasingly complex. As a result, the network team often functions as a first responder, ensuring the continued and uninterrupted delivery of critical services.

In our Seventh Annual State of the Network survey earlier this year, we discovered that nearly three-quarters of IT managers cited their top application troubleshooting challenge as determining the root cause of performance problems. These problems take too much time to isolate and repair, and this downtime has a real impact on the bottom line. According to research firm Aberdeen Group, every hour of downtime costs an organization $163,674.

To effectively turn this tide, IT teams need comprehensive data at their fingertips that incorporates all operational views of the network, from systems to applications in a single view. This is something at which the Observer Performance Management Platform excels.

The Observer Performance Management Platform Version 17 delivers high-level, real-time performance views, applies advanced application analytics, reliably captures every packet, and polls every infrastructure resource for accurate resolution. It helps network teams lead the charge in ensuring service availability by:

• Facilitating closer coordination between the IT teams
• Providing greater web application insight

Improve IT Coordination

The latest release of the Observer Platform simplifies the process of sharing critical performance insight with other IT teams. Through new user interfaces and RESTful API’s, this powerful solution streamlines the process of creating and sharing dashboards and reports while integrating this insight into third-party tools and workflows. The end result is that problems will be fixed sooner and IT is better equipped to maintain peak service performance.

Expanded Web Application Insight

Since web-based applications have become the most common way for users to gain access to a company’s online resources, the need for detailed operational information into these services continues to grow. The Observer Platform meets this need by providing IT teams fine-grained metrics into end-user access methods such as browser type and platform, alongside status and resource usage as it relates to web applications. This provides network and application managers the detail they need to quantify user access behavior and experience to solve problems.

As the network manager is increasingly relied upon to be the first responder, the Observer Platform helps network teams lead the charge to keep applications working smoothly. The new user interface, streamlined workflows, and transaction-level capabilities of the latest release of the Observer Platform provide the integrated intelligence, ensuring that IT and network teams can successfully collaborate in the successful delivery of services. Learn more about the Observer Platform 17 release.

Thanks to JDSU for the article.