TRENDING now called ‘ super-apps ’ will play an increasingly important role in feeding users ’ demand for new services , convenience as well as connecting remote populations to essential services .
The consequences of network issues , including loss of productivity , cannot be understated .
How can NPM help businesses ?
So , what should organizations prioritise when looking at delivering apps that meet the highest standards ?
Don ’ t underestimate the importance of the network
Applications are made up of a variety of components but the network one thing links them all and plays a determining role in a successful application experience ( AX ) and user experience ( UX ).
Where the network goes wrong , it can drive much bigger consequences than a simple app malfunctioning .
Understanding how fast apps are running , any existing pain points and how to mitigate these are essential to ensure that apps are providing an optimum user experience . This can be achieved through implementing an Application-Aware Network Performance Monitoring ( AA-NPM ) tool or Network Performance Monitoring ( NPM ) for short as a key component of the network management .
NPM solutions work on the network level with application layer visibility . They detect application traffic and measure the transport time of a request from user to application . It can also track application delay , and response time from the application server to the request .
Should an application error arise , NPM solutions empower IT and network teams with error details such as the error code , its timing , user identification and further information about the transaction . IT can then troubleshoot the transaction and the issue can be resolved and application performance restored .
Suppose users have reported experiencing slow network speeds with websites taking an excessively long time to load . Additionally , remote users are unable to connect to local systems . NPM allows the administrator to promptly verify Internet bandwidth utilization by comparing the volume of data transfers to the available capacity .
Pavel Minarik , Vice President of
Technology , Progress
In recent months , the APAC region has experienced many network issues , including full outages , that have greatly impacted organizations and their consumers .
A routing error in the network of Cloudflare , one of the largest content delivery network services , caused a massive website outage in Pakistan and other countries in the Asia Pacific ( APAC ) region , leading to a slower browsing experience for users .
Earlier , Microsoft was hit with a networking outage that took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook , affecting services across Asia Pacific .
Prompted by slow connectivity in their network that was limiting some users ’ activity , a company ’ s IT team found out that large amounts of data for a Windows update were downloaded from an external source instead of using a local WSUS server .
Thanks to the NPM in place , the mean time to resolve ( MTTR ) was reduced from an average of 20 – 60 minutes to 10 minutes as the administrator was able to quickly find the devices responsible for the downloads and reconfigure them with three clicks . With the average outage costing $ 4,500 per minute ( for a 2,500 – 5,000-employee company ), this meant savings of $ 225,000 for the company .
Best practice for app-driven industries
There are many application-driven companies and industries across APAC that could particularly benefit from better network monitoring to support their user experience but also avoid critical incidents that could have much bigger repercussions .
24 INTELLIGENTCIO APAC www . intelligentcio . com