Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics Market Guide (2020 Edition)

With the acceleration of cloud migration and the introduction of microservices/container architecture, new dynamic network architectures are affecting the efficiency of traditional network monitoring systems. A well-performing network is essential for digital business projects. However, the level of network flexibility and visibility often cannot meet the needs.

[[344824]]

The goals of network operations are increasingly aligned with those of security operations, with the common goal of ensuring a well-performing and secure network. Gartner believes that IT decision makers focused on infrastructure, operations and cloud management should rethink their approach to monitoring the network.

• Future-proof network monitoring by investing in network performance monitoring and diagnostic tools that provide the level of visibility required for hybrid environments, including edge and cloud network monitoring.
• Improve alignment with business objectives and their requirements for network visibility and agility by evaluating NPMD solutions that provide business-level analytics and integration with automated workflows.
• Enhance alignment between network operations and security operations by aligning NPMD procurement decisions with security analytics solutions, including network traffic analysis tools.

1. Definition of NPMD Market

Gartner defines network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) as a class of tools that use a combination of packet data, flow data and infrastructure metrics to provide historical, real-time and predictive views into the availability and performance of the network and the applications running on it.

NPMD tools provide diagnostic workflows and forensic data through IT operations (AIOps) capabilities to identify the root cause of performance degradation. NPMD tools allow IT operations to understand application performance, network and infrastructure components through network data, and can also provide insights into the quality of end-user experience.

NPMD tools play multiple roles in IT systems and gradually support enterprise business. It has the ability to monitor, diagnose and generate alerts for dynamic end-to-end network service delivery, which can improve network capacity management and thus reduce the capital investment of enterprises in network equipment and services. Because it involves:

• Digital Experience Management (DEM): Get data on end-to-end application availability from a network perspective, as well as network latency and quality presented to end users.
• Network Application Monitoring (NAM): Defined by operators of NPMD products, it monitors the speed and overall quality of networked applications delivered to users in support of critical business activities.
• Infrastructure component interactions: Focuses on infrastructure components that interact over a network, and the network delivery of services or applications. This includes the ability to provide network path analysis.

The purpose of deploying NPMD products is not only to monitor network traffic and infrastructure and provide solutions for downtime/poor operation, but also to identify opportunities for performance optimization, troubleshoot the current network, understand what has happened and is happening, and use analytical technology to make predictions.

▲Key data sources, use cases and roles in the NPMD market

Gartner predicts that the global NPMD market will reach approximately $2.9 billion by 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.1% by 2023. By 2024, 50% of network operations teams will need to rebuild their network monitoring systems due to the impact of hybrid networks.

(II) NPMD market direction

The NPMD market has witnessed significant changes in the past few years. This report discusses some of the key points:

1. Migrate to the cloud

The transition from traditional hub and spoke network designs to one where applications can be accessed anywhere has created challenges for traditional network infrastructure monitoring. In network traffic monitoring tools, there is no easy place to capture traffic. Certain NPMD vendors have responded to this challenge by adding DEM capabilities to their solutions.

2. Changes in the edge

Devices connected to the network are no longer bound by traditional endpoints and infrastructure components, and now there are a large number of mobile, IoT and operational technology (OT) endpoints connected to the network. These devices force the network to adapt to different types and patterns of traffic.

Some NPMD vendors have responded to this challenge by improving their scalability and support variety. Some of these measures include leveraging new types of metric collection, using streaming telemetry or in-band network telemetry as an alternative to traditional SNMP.

3. Cloud Native Architecture

As applications are broken down into microservices and deployed on cloud-native architectures, visibility into network traffic has fundamentally changed. As a result, monitoring tools are forced to adopt alternative methods to view container-to-container traffic, thereby leveraging telemetry from APIs in container orchestrators or service meshes.

The NPMD market has been slow to respond to these challenges, but cloud-native infrastructure monitoring vendors and APM vendors have shown initiative to cater to these DevOps/CloudOps users. Some NPMD vendors have begun to add artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML)-based analytics technologies.

4. Data packets are difficult to collect

The main change in the NPMD market is that the ingestion and analysis of network packet traffic is becoming increasingly difficult. As a result, some NPMD vendors have expanded their product offerings to focus more on API-based metric collection and flow collection. Other NPMD vendors have also introduced virtualization for use in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments.

In addition, packet-based network traffic analysis (NTA) technology is not only used in the NPMD field, but is also gradually being more widely used in the security field. There is growing interest in the network traffic analysis (NTA) market focused on network security, which uses similar data packets for threat analysis.

The changing nature of security threats due to insider attacks has led to a surge of interest in this area. Network packet brokers are often used to aggregate network traffic and feed it to NPMD or NTA solutions, the latter of which are increasingly interesting for SecOps teams.

(III) NPMD market analysis

NPMD tools can improve network capacity management, thereby optimizing the enterprise's investment in network equipment and services. This is critical to the success of the five different types of stakeholders involved in this work: network operators, network architects, IT operations managers, IT operations specialists, and LOB users.

At the technical level, Gartner has made a corresponding interpretation of the NPMD field. NPMD tools are designed to provide the required breadth and depth of visibility in real-time and historical perspectives by analyzing data from the following technologies: device polling technology, data flow-based technology, and packet-based technology.

The type of NPMD solution usually keeps pace with the overall monitoring maturity of IT operations. In the report, Gartner divides IT operations management (ITOM) maturity into five stages from low to high: Stage 1 and Stage 2 focus on equipment availability monitoring;

Phases 3 and 4 shift the focus to online business, achieving transaction monitoring, event correlation and root cause analysis, achieving business insights, and focusing on business-related KPI indicators; Phase 5 places more emphasis on intelligence, achieving self-driven information-based operation management, and proactively discovering and automatically solving problems.

In addition, according to Gartner's 2019 IOCS (IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference) survey results, half of the respondents were in the first two stages, which shows the relative immaturity of most end-user monitoring systems.

(IV) NPMD representative manufacturers

In this market guide, 20 manufacturers including Broadcom, Cisco, Coleus, and Riverbed are selected for detailed introduction. In addition, this market also includes suppliers such as Huawei, H3C, IBM, and VMware. They only represent a part of the NPMD market, providing monitoring and diagnostic functions to ensure high-performance networks.

Gartner recommends that enterprises carefully consider the following aspects when developing NPMD strategies and solution selection:

• Standardization of UIs and workflows across multiple vendor tool sets. Many NPMD solutions are assembled from multiple products with inconsistent user interfaces, which can either enable modular adoption of NPMD capabilities or significantly increase the complexity of procurement and ongoing maintenance.
• Ease of use still needs improvement and varies widely between vendors and within solutions.
• Vendors are increasingly leveraging big data backends or building operational analytics overlays to facilitate analysis of all captured data, especially as the volume and variety of data increases.
• Interest in packet analysis hardware appliances is waning, with the focus on monitoring data center-centric traffic due to high costs, increases in east-west and encrypted traffic, and cloud migration.
• There is a growing demand for flexible deployments, including SaaS and on-demand pricing, and many NPMD vendors offer such options.