I’ve been at Networking Field Day this week, and as always the conversations have been great and focused around a variety of networking topics. One that keeps jumping out at me is network analytics. There’s a few things that have come up that were especially interesting to me:

• Don’t ask yourself if networking monitoring is not worth your time. Odds are good you’re already monitoring stuff in your network and you don’t even realize it. Many networking vendors enable basic analytics for troubleshooting purposes. You need to figure out how to build that into a bigger part of your workflows.
• Remember that analytics can integrate with platforms you’re already using. If you’re using ServiceNow you can integrate everything into it. No better way to learn how analytics can help you than to setup some kind of ticket generation for down networks. And, if that automation causes you to get overloaded with link flaps you’ll have even more motivation to figure out why your provider can’t keep things running.
• Don’t discount open source tools. The world has come a long way since MRTG and Cacti. In fact, a lot of the flagship analytics platforms are built with open source tools as a starting point. If you can figure out how to use the “free” versions, you can figure out how to implement the bigger stuff too. The paid versions may look nicer or have deeper integrations, but you can bet that they all work mostly the same under the hood.
• Finally, remember that you can’t possible deal with all this data yourself. You can collect it but parsing it is like trying to drink from a firehose of pond water. You need to treat the data and then analyze that result. Find tools (probably open source) that help you understand what you’re seeing. If it saves you 10 minutes of looking, it’s worth it.

Tom’s Take

Be sure to say tuned to our Gestalt IT On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast in the coming weeks for more great discussion on the analytics topic. We’ve got an episode that should be out soon that will take the discussion of the “expense” of networking analytics in a new direction.