5 Ways to Gain Operational Insights on Big Data Analytics
April 20, 2015

Michael Segal
NetScout

Share this

We are starting to see an age where speed-of-thought analytical tools are helping to quickly analyze large volumes of data to uncover market trends, customer preferences, gain competitive insight and collect other useful business information. Likewise, utilizing ‘big data’ creates new opportunities to gain deep insight into operational efficiencies.

The realization by business executives that corporate data is an extremely valuable asset, and that effective analysis of big data may have a profound impact on their bottom line is the key driver in the adoption of this trend. According to IDC, the big data and analytics market will reach $125 billion worldwide in 2015, which will help enterprises across all industries gain new operational insights.

Effective integration of big data analytics within corporate business processes is critical to harness the wealth of knowledge that can be extracted from corporate data. While a variety of structured and unstructured big data is stored in large volumes on different servers within the organization, virtually all this data traverses the network at one time or another. Analysis of the traffic data traversing the network can provide deep operational insight, provided there is an end-to-end holistic visibility of this data.

To ensure holistic visibility, the first step is to select a performance management platform that offers the scalability and flexibility needed to analyze large volumes of data in real-time.

The solution should also include packet flow switches to enable passive and intelligent distribution of big data that traverses the network to the different location where the data is analyzed.

Here are five ways IT operations can use Big Data analytics to achieve operational efficiencies:

1. Holistic end-to-end visibility

A holistic view, from the data center and network to the users who consume business services, helps IT see the relationships and interdependencies across all service delivery components; including applications, network, servers, databases and enabling protocols in order to see which user communities and services are utilizing the network and how they’re performing.

2. Big Data analysis based on deep packet inspection

Deep packet analysis can be used to generate a metadata at an atomic level which provides comprehensive, real-time view of all service components, including physical and virtual networks, workloads, protocols, servers, databases, users and devices to help desktop, network, telecom and application teams see through the same lens.

3. Decreased downtime

A Forrester survey shows 91% of IT respondents cite problem identification as the number one improvement needed in their organization’s IT operations. As applications and business services’ complexity increases, reducing costly downtime will hinge on proactively detecting service degradations and rapid triage to identify its origin, which can be done through the right performance management platform.

4. Capacity planning

Accurate evidence is vital when it comes to making capacity planning decisions for your network and business processes. Benefits of metadata at an atomic level will aid in understanding the current and future needs of your organization’s services, applications and its community of users in order to identify how resources are being consumed.

5. Hyper scalability

Big data analytic tools that can scale to increasing data traffic flows provide key vantage points throughout your IT environment and offer rapid insight to meet the monitoring needs of high-density locations in data center and private/hybrid cloud deployments to help organizations achieve consistent service quality and operational excellence.

Network traffic Big Data analytics, made possible by today’s service performance management platforms, is changing the scope and quality of IT operational efficiencies. These platforms and technologies are not only protecting organizations against service degradations and downtime, but also serve to add new dimensions and context around interactive data making corporate data today an extremely valuable asset.

Michael Segal is VP of Strategy at NetScout
Share this

The Latest

March 27, 2024

Nearly all (99%) globa IT decision makers, regardless of region or industry, recognize generative AI's (GenAI) transformative potential to influence change within their organizations, according to The Elastic Generative AI Report ...

March 27, 2024

Agent-based approaches to real user monitoring (RUM) simply do not work. If you are pitched to install an "agent" in your mobile or web environments, you should run for the hills ...

March 26, 2024

The world is now all about end-users. This paradigm of focusing on the end-user was simply not true a few years ago, as backend metrics generally revolved around uptime, SLAs, latency, and the like. DevOps teams always pitched and presented the metrics they thought were the most correlated to the end-user experience. But let's be blunt: Unless there was an egregious fire, the correlated metrics were super loose or entirely false ...

March 25, 2024

This year, New Relic published the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance Report to share insights derived from the 2023 Observability Forecast on the adoption and business value of observability across the financial services industry (FSI) and insurance sectors. Here are seven key takeaways from the report ...

March 22, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and AIOps ...

March 21, 2024

In the course of EMA research over the last twelve years, the message for IT organizations looking to pursue a forward path in AIOps adoption is overall a strongly positive one. The benefits achieved are growing in diversity and value ...

March 20, 2024

Today, as enterprises transcend into a new era of work, surpassing the revolution, they must shift their focus and strategies to thrive in this environment. Here are five key areas that organizations should prioritize to strengthen their foundation and steer themselves through the ever-changing digital world ...

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...