In my experience, poor network performance can cause outages that cascade unpredictably through the business and cost you plenty. Are you experiencing any of these signs of trouble?

1. 1 Network-dependent applications have become sluggish — and your employees, customers, and suppliers are letting you know how unhappy they are.
2. 2 Network administrators struggle to isolate the cause of poor network performance.
3. 3 Network administrators regularly face ‘alert floods’ (lots of error messages from a single device that affect many other service elements) but can’t correlate these alerts and can’t suppress them to avoid drowning in error messages.
4. 4 Network administrators say they’re not getting the performance metrics they need fast enough, since separate software is used to monitor capacity, security, performance, and faults — but the management software they recommend, and the expertise needed to run it, is prohibitively expensive.
5. 5 Network administrators complain about having to constantly tune the network.
6. 6 Your IT security folks and your network administrators are engaged in a blame game, due to lack of visibility into the network, which has impeded the ability to catch and block malicious network traffic.

Next time, I’ll blog about what you can do to improve things.