What is Network Assurance?
Network assurance is an IT management category designed to enable organizations to assure digital experiences over any network—whether they own the network or not. By understanding the full context of experience and its underlying factors, organizations are empowered to actively and continuously manage service outcomes for customers, employees, and critical IT infrastructure.
Network assurance focuses on the end-to-end “network” of interconnected private environments, service providers, and services that form a user’s experience of an application or service—from Internet service providers (ISPs), public cloud, SaaS, and more. It provides a holistic view of digital experience by showing each connected element, such as a router, DNS resolver, or web server, and its impact in relation to other elements and performance as a whole.
Network assurance leverages a variety of technologies, including Internet route monitoring, automated diagnostics, predictive analytics, synthetic testing, browser-derived real user monitoring (RUM), outage detection, and more, to construct an end-to-end view of service delivery and performance—ultimately, enabling organizations to operate faster and more effectively in a dramatically transformed IT environment.
Soaring Digital Complexity Increases Business Risk
The Internet is now increasingly functioning as the enterprise network, cloud is replacing or supplementing the data center, and SaaS and APIs have become the most significant part of the enterprise application stack. Yet, the Internet is a “best effort” network, and most cloud-based applications and services either lack SLAs or have ones that are difficult to enforce and are unlikely to provide meaningful recompense.
As organizations have adopted a multiplicity of external services, many highly interconnected with one another, they no longer own all of the infrastructure and applications they rely on—increasing the risk to business continuity, workforce productivity, and brand reputation. Ultimately, organizations must take ownership of the entire service delivery chain their business relies on—from end to end—by implementing a continuous lifecycle approach. This includes planning, baselining, troubleshooting, and optimization, leveraging capabilities such as automated incident analysis, diagnostics, and remediation, along with forecasting and recommendations.
Traditional Monitoring Is No Longer Good Enough
Traditional, domain-specific monitoring approaches, such as network performance management (NPM) and application performance management (APM), are particularly good at providing visibility into networks and applications that IT can instrument. However, organizations grappling with today’s digital complexity need visibility that goes beyond their “four walls,” from end to end, to domains that they do not own or control. In addition, recently created IT categories like digital experience monitoring (DEM) generally focus on the monitoring of experience rather than the active management of it.
Network assurance not only addresses the external visibility gaps in existing management categories and toolsets but it is also designed to go beyond monitoring by providing capabilities that enable organizations to actively manage service delivery across external environments.
A New Paradigm: ThousandEyes Network Assurance
ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure their digital experience over any network by providing deep visibility and comprehension of the end-to-end digital supply chain. It focuses on reducing the complexity and time required to address digital experience concerns with proactive intelligence and ecosystem integrations, enabling automated diagnostics, closed-loop remediation, and optimization. These capabilities help IT and network operations teams minimize the need for manual analysis, improve the efficacy of issue resolution, and even overcome business silos by democratizing insight across the business into the state of digital infrastructure. This makes the de-risking of digital transformation initiatives, protecting business continuity, and accelerating business agility and innovation a collective and accessible goal of the entire organization.
Conquer Digital Complexity With ThousandEyes Network Assurance