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Building Resilience: Modern Business Networks Need SaaS Monitoring

Rosalind Whitley
Rosalind WhitleyDirector, Product Marketing - Cloud

Network Monitoring
feature-saas-differentiatiors

Summary

Traditional network monitoring systems can’t meet the dynamic demands of modern business networks. Modern NMSs built with SaaS-native architecture enable enterprises to deliver exceptional customer experiences, powered by scalable, high-performance, innovative monitoring.


As digital transformation continues to dictate market trends, an agile and robust network infrastructure is still pivotal for enterprises aiming to maintain competitive advantage. Traditional network monitoring systems (NMS), typically constrained by on-premises architectures, no longer meet the dynamic demands of modern networks and businesses. SaaS-delivered NMSs not only address the inherent limitations of traditional systems but also deliver scalability, performance, and continual innovation.

Scalability, tailored to growth

SaaS models have revolutionized numerous software sectors, but network monitoring systems have not kept pace. While still the standard for network monitoring, on-premises solutions stifle infrastructure growth and flexibility by requiring significant upfront infrastructure investment and ongoing maintenance to scale reliably alongside the business. When a traditional NMS fails to keep pace with evolving workloads, this threatens application reliability, performance, and resilience. SaaS-delivered NMS, particularly those with SaaS-native architecture, break this mold by providing near-infinite scalability. This allows enterprises to expand monitoring activities seamlessly with business growth without the typical overheads associated with NMS physical infrastructure upgrades or replacements. That way, network monitoring scales dynamically and efficiently, with no waiting, whether the infrastructure team is dealing with increased traffic, more complex network architectures, or rapid geographic expansion.

Optimizing performance to drive impact

Moving to a SaaS-delivered NMS allows network and IT managers to leverage the full spectrum of SaaS benefits — from reduced total cost of ownership and decreased operational burdens to enhanced security features and compliance capabilities. This modernization is as much about transforming your network management to be more flexible, scalable, and aligned with modern business practices as it is about upgrading technology to leverage recent networking advancements such as streaming telemetry. All of these motions translate to a higher-quality user experience.

An NMS should deliver fast, high-performance monitoring in the browser to ensure operations teams can access critical data and insights in real-time, facilitating swift decision-making and operational responsiveness. Traditional systems often suffer from delays and performance bottlenecks, whereas modern monitoring apps with SaaS-native architecture ensure optimal efficiency and user experience by significantly reducing the time to resolve network issues, minimizing downtime and performance degradation.

EMA Network Management Megatrends 2024
See how IT professionals responded to the EMA survey about their approach to managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting their networks.

Continuous innovation

The SaaS model of software delivery is celebrated because it embraces rapid technological evolution. This starkly contrasts with most traditional NMS solutions, such as Solarwinds, which fail to deliver modern features such as container workload support, containerized deployment, and streaming telemetry support. When they do release product updates, they require manual upgrades on-prem, creating a lag in integrating the latest features. Meanwhile, access to contemporary innovations such as AI-assisted queries and insights is completely off the table for users of these traditional on-prem solutions.

SaaS vendors continuously update their platforms with the newest functionalities. Kentik’s NMS product is no exception and equips users with state-of-the-art tools for traffic analysis and insights, DDoS detection and mitigation, cloud and hybrid environment monitoring, and natural language query to help them operate the networks of today. A strong vendor commitment to innovation keeps your network monitoring system current and adaptable to future technological advancements.

A strategic shift to SaaS NMS

Adopting a SaaS-delivered NMS represents a strategic investment in the future resilience and agility of your business. Once you’re ready to rethink how you monitor and manage your networks, moving away from outdated legacy systems towards a more flexible, scalable, and innovative SaaS model will enhance operational efficiency and position the business for future growth and technological changes. In doing so, you can ensure that your network infrastructure—a critical asset in today’s digital landscape—is robust, responsive, and ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

Watch this video to learn more about how a SaaS NMS can unify telemetry to observe complex modern networks.

 

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