IT teams are dedicating increasing amounts of time on getting to the bottom of network-performance issues.
According to network-monitoring company Network Instruments's research, three-quarters of network professionals cite 'identifying the source of a problem' as their primary troubleshooting concern — up a quarter on last year.
The research also found performance problems are rising, with more than two-thirds of respondents spending between 25 and 50 days per year determining the cause of network issues. Almost half spend more than 50 days annually doing this.
Three-quarters of respondents named security and compliance as their major network headache, while almost a third of respondents cited the lack of troubleshooting information as their biggest concern. Other common bugbears include bandwidth consumption, application latency, sporadic performance errors and ensuring application delivery.
Ian Cummins, vice president of EMEA for Network Instruments, said these problems will continue to grow as companies implement new technologies and applications on their networks, and said without the "necessary visibility" into these applications, performance will continue to suffer.
Meanwhile the rate of VoIP implementations has increased five percent on last year, with 66 percent of organisations having implemented or looking to implement VoIP in the next 12 months. Network professionals' biggest VoIP concerns are quality of service and the impact it has on other apps.
The survey also found confidence in VoIP networks is growing. In 2007, just 13 percent said they were completely confident in their system, compared to a quarter in 2008.
Globally, migration to multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) data networks appears to be steady, the survey found, with most organisations still in the early stages of adoption. More than a third of respondents said they will have migrated to MPLS networks in the next year, while just over half have no intention of migrating.
Less than a third of organisations said they plan to implement 10GB networks in the next 12 months.
The survey was completed by 592 network engineers, IT directors and chief information officers in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America.
Talkback
I don't doubt that network admins are spending large quantities of time troubleshooting network issues. I do think that a large part of this is because many organizations have a lack of proactive monitoring of their networks. Problems are handled when something breaks. This is a bad approach as the resources that you end up spending trying to fix things after they broke (not to mention possible lost revenue, e-mail, etc from the broken network) are a lot more expensive than the cost of getting good monitoring in place. Good monitoring helps stop problems while they're still minor preventing the failure in the first place.
As part of my role, I used to monitor network traffic and behaviour looking for trends, thus being able to head off prospective problems so they never occurred. I got laid off as an unnecessary expense and was fairly shortly afterwards replaced by three people who still only managed part of the role.
I can fully understand the logic behind waiting till it breaks as there is more kudos delivered by fixing something broken than not having the problem in the first place.
I still follow the same principles and was rewarded by one ex colleague stating that after 5 years of my systems, they were completely unaware that there were IT problems until they went to work for another employer, but again the last (new) company owner was remote and the 99.999(9) reliability and uptime figures and lack of problems were used to prove he didn't need me any more (yet once again).
When I explain to prospective employers how I work, it confuses them so maybe some good will come out of it and public exposure of the problems will help me get a new job!
I guess I've been lucky in not encountering any environments where that's the case. In the places I've worked downtime meant missed revenue so 99.99% was expected and NOT achieving it would mean someone else would soon have my job. Thanks for the insight in to the other side, it's really interesting.