FEATURE
monitoring alerts. The moving parts move
quickly and the data streaming across the
infrastructure is dense and convoluted.
This makes it difficult for operation teams
to isolate issues quickly. The complexity
of a microservice-based environment,
for example, introduces data overload.
This makes it difficult to connect the dots
and correlate across multiple resources
and quickly isolate the issue, negating or
limiting its impact on the business.
when they’re dealing with constrained
budgets and headcount. IT operations are
left scrambling to ensure the availability
and performance of new as well as legacy
applications and services.
According to Jeff Bezos’ ‘Day Two’
philosophy, an expanding organisation
tends to rely increasingly on process
rather than results. When process
becomes the norm, companies stop
looking at outcomes and only consider
whether they are doing the right thing.
Their eyes are on the dashboard – not
the way ahead.
When to plan your
operational strategy
To optimise the impact and effectiveness of
ongoing ‘Day Two’ operations, we need to
apply and integrate operational solutions
and processes during the day one planning
and implementation phases of projects.
A key element of this strategy should
include trimming down the burgeoning
dashboard by consolidating all essential
monitoring functions into a single source
of truth, making it easier to correlate
and contextualise their information.
All the more so with the trend towards
microservices-based application
development. These microservices are
widely dispersed and their scale and
transient characteristics introduce further
monitoring challenges. It’s not feasible
to track all the infrastructure interactions
and dependencies discreetly. Instead,
a baseline is developed during the
development and deployment phases,
which is used to quickly and proactively
identify later anomalies. Without a single,
accessible source of truth, it becomes
increasingly difficult to understand
infrastructure dependencies, build greater
knowledge of the infrastructure, and
learn how to quickly isolate and diagnose
operational events.
The implementation phase is critical in
itself. It is a source of rich data needed to
validate the architecture’s readiness to
perform as expected, and it can lay down
the baseline for subsequent operations.
Autonomous operations –
The next step
Automating the operations process
empowers IT organisations to rapidly
deploy complex solutions and ensure their
success beyond the implementation phase.
The network produces a tremendous
amount of data, including thousands of
Zack Zilakakis, a product marketing
leader at Apstra
The ideal would be a solution that can
query the single source of truth to interpret
and analyse all pertinent data. The
introduction of Machine Learning capability
means that it can learn to contextualise
and automatically identify anomalous
behaviours that point to negative changes
to the infrastructure. If this is done
automatically, and a warning flagged
before the problems occur, prompt action
can be taken to resolve the issue. The
meantime-to-resolution will be reduced
and re-occurrences can be avoided.
This is the objective of intent-based
analytic solutions. To replace a tumult of
data from multiple disparate monitoring
tools with a single source of truth, plus
a combination of rules-based principles,
plus Machine Learning’s capability to
grow more intelligent and aware of the
entire infrastructure over time.
The automobile industry has long
understood this: today’s cars are far
more complex, but their dashboards
have become simpler – because so
many tasks such as balancing ignition
timing and petrol/air mix, have been
automated. A simple, clear dashboard
allows us to keep our attention on the
way ahead. And today’s cars are both
faster and safer for that.
What next? Autonomous vehicles are
a hot topic and the same will be true
in networking. The next step in intentbased
analytic networking is to automate
responses to likely situations and create
an autonomous network that looks
after itself most of the time – allowing
operators to focus on the business
objectives ahead.
That is ultimately what ‘intent-based
networking’ is all about. ◊
46 Issue 18
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