The Critical Role Of The Trusted Advisor In NetOps

Before there was “Network Operations” there were networks. Networks grew out of a need for connecting one box to another, sharing printers, and for more advanced users, files. These were simpler times and the care and feeding of networks was not well understood as a strategic business challenge. Remember networks were not a critical requirement in those early days, so resolving access problems to a shared printer was not a high priority task and it was usually handled by the telecom guys that took care of the desk phones. And the telecom team was also not well versed in choosing computing solutions, hardware or software. So as the personal computing technology advanced, resellers and distributors cut their teeth on providing these higher-tech solutions, advising their clients on the hundreds of choices of PCs, Printers and workgroup networking solutions available. Companies like us were setting the stage for our future… to position ourselves as a trusted advisor and helping our customers SELECT the best products to handle these forward-looking computing scenarios.

It’s probably also worth reminding everyone that channel providers like us would actually PREFER to be referred to as a “VAR” because it defines our core function as “Value-Added”. We don’t lead on price, we lead on value. We are experts in technology and help customers solve their current problems, doing the legwork to expose our clients to new proven solutions, and narrowing the available choices down for our customers, based on their specific unique requirements. We solve customers’ problems, sometimes before they know they should ask us to…

So is the case for NetBrain®. While many of our customers have grown their networks over time, in both scope and scale, they are now finding an overwhelming burden with keeping their cloud-to-edge network up and running, responding to hundreds or thousands of end-user and application delivery needs every month. Interestingly, many of the network operations people we meet know that the problem of handling network operations at scale is a critical issue, but they are unaware that there is a solution to the problem. And that’s OUR job, as a Trusted Advisor, to bring strategic new offerings to the table, such as NetBrain, that addresses network operations scale issue.

So we were thrilled when NetBrain introduced their latest Problem Diagnosis Automation System (PDAS). It solves the problem that we KNOW every one of our customers has, but there was simply no answer to- until PDAS! In a nutshell, NetBrain has been known for almost 20 years as the industry’s most comprehensive dynamic mapping solution. Thousands of customers use NetBrain today to capture their edge-to-cloud topology, and then dynamic trace traffic paths and performance across that infrastructure. PDAS builds upon that network model by adding easy to consume Network Automation, the way it has always been imagined to be. It integrates with ITSM systems such as ServiceNow, and addresses three key problems that exist at scale:

1. Acceleration of network service tickets to reduce MTTR and reduce risk.
2. Proactively identifying network abnormalities before the condition affects network production.
3. Hybrid network visibility, from edge to cloud, including the ability to see traffic flows in real-time.

Imagine finding network problems before they cause a network failure and a ton of user complaints. Human error and other failures happens all the time, so finding those problems early is ideal. And imagine reducing your network service ticket times from 8 hours to 2 hours simply by automating all of the triage and network diagnostics and leveraging your subject matter experts experience which has been captured, ready to be re-used by anyone. Those saved hours are also measures of risk and downtime, so reducing the duration of every network service ticket will have a huge impact on the business aspects of your IT service delivery strategy.

PDAS is a keeper and we are happy to put our name on bringing it to customers. It’s easy to use, supports all of the infrastructure already in place, include the cloud providers, and it even comes with a pre-built (and growing) automation library of the most common diagnostics needed to address the vast majority of network service tickets along with the most common types of proactive situations that aren’t visible until it’s too late (i.e. HA pairs that are out of alignment).

Trusted advisor is not just a title, it’s a strategic role and we take it seriously. We would be thrilled to show now NetBrain’s PDAS can be used to power the core of your network service delivery function.