How to Optimize Team Productivity

Knowing Your Network Has Never Been So Important

In a recent blog, I discussed the importance of understanding what endpoints were connected to your network from the cybersecurity perspective of detecting rogue devices and unauthorized network changes fast. The reasons for maintaining an updated asset inventory of endpoints and infrastructure with a corresponding topology map are numerous and go well beyond cybersecurity. This blog will discuss the importance of up-to-date and accurate network documentation with the ability to visualize how they are connected via topology maps.  

The Importance of Up-to-Date Network Asset Inventory and Topology Maps

The are plenty of good reasons for keeping a current, accurate list of assets or topology map, such as:

• Network Management and Optimization – Before you can efficiently make decisions on allocating current or future resources you need a comprehensive understanding of the “current state” of the network.  Closely associated with this is ensuring optimal performance and availability of the network, which begins with locating current bottlenecks or areas that likely could be sources of degraded service capabilities in the near-term. 
• Capacity Planning, Scalability, and Change Management – Related to network management and optimization is the importance of a proactive stance that will account for growth, whether in additional bandwidth, new endpoints, or refreshes to infrastructure to maintain sufficient end-user performance.  In the context of costly infrastructure, making informed investments decisions in new technologies begins with first knowing what you have now that is working or not working. When the times arrives for network updates, having a list of the current state makes changes much less likely to be disruptive and increases the probability that transition will be seamless.
• Troubleshooting – Often, the first time it becomes apparent that network documentation is outdated, is when there is a problem or when performing maintenance. Few things slow resolution more than a topology map that does not represent the production network. Without it, the time it takes to pinpoint the root cause can be excessive. Worse, the downtime correspondingly grows as does the negative impact to the organization and end-users.
• Compliance and Auditing – Depending on country and/or industry, there may well be regulatory demands that require up-to-date network documents. This can be critical when a compliance audit is being completed on IT assets and network infrastructure. Having ready evidence in the form of current inventory list or topology map can demonstrate compliance and make audit go smoothly.
• Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity – When performing disaster recovery planning, having the latest network resource documentation is crucial. Identifying key infrastructure components means getting services back up and running in an expediated manner. In addition, network resources availability can be improved via added resiliency measures such as failover and redundancy.

The Organizational Struggle to Maintain Accurate Network Resource Documentation

Hopefully, at this point it should be clear there are many, excellent reasons for keeping network documentation current and up-to-date topology maps at the ready. So, why do so many organizations struggle to accomplish it? If your team finds it a challenge, perhaps it is because of one or several of the following reasons:

• Overworked Staff – Most network teams are short headcount and/or overworked. Depending on the available tools, keeping documentation current can be time-consuming, especially in organizations with larger, dynamic edge networks where staff members spend most of their time “firefighting” current problems.   
• Technology Churn and Complexity – Given the dynamic nature of today’s networks, there is often frequent and ongoing changes to network links, APs, and new devices—among other things. Complexity is another material factor here with the rapid growth of endpoints and cloud-based services. Getting in front of documentation updates can help eliminate the headaches of “flying blind” while also enabling IT teams to stay ahead of the deluge of emerging technologies.
• Lack of Automated Tools and Internal Procedures – Often these two go together, there is no formal automated processes to ensure documentation is kept current nor the tools and knowledge to enable the process. Some teams use manual processes, but these are error prone and often not strictly followed. Here organizational obstacles often are apparent, whether they are tied to the lack of clear policies or IT teams that are siloed so there are no consistent processes followed across the enterprise.
• Human Nature and Budget Challenges – Beyond staffing short falls, many network teams prioritize near-term operational objectives, expecting to follow-up with the documentation later. In this case, either consciously or unconsciously the effort becomes a nice-to-have and is never completed. There can also be difficulties with training and having the right tools in place to accomplish the goal.
• Integration with Existing Tools – Many IT teams are buried it tools, so adding another one to the list and then ensuring seamless tie-ins to other solutions is viewed as simply too much effort. However, there is no one solution that can provide complete end-to-end network visibility, so strategic cross-vendor integration is essential for most organizations.

Simple, Repeatable Processes and Tools with Easy Workflows are the Solution

Given the myriads of challenges and difficulties in maintaining up-to-date network documentation described above, the outline of a solution starts to emerge. In a nutshell, to address both the criticality and real-world organizational struggles, the solution must include simple processes and easy-to-implement procedures that can be rolled out across all IT teams thereby facilitating staff adherence. It should be simple to learn with streamlined output that can show changes over time without being overly costly. Given the dynamic nature of today’s networks, with the expectation of high levels of service delivery and limited downtime, the best solution would provide comprehensive visibility in a manner that satisfies all stakeholders from those responsible for troubleshooting to senior staff involved in infrastructure purchase decisions and ideally executive management reporting as well. 

How Link-Live™ Discovery Analysis Platform Can Help

The Link-Live Discovery Analysis platform is just such as solution. By processing discovery data provided by various, select NetAlly handheld tools that offer Network Discovery, Link-Live Discovery Analysis intuitively presents data in graphical, tabular, and topology views. Users can click between perspectives as required with persistent filtering to satisfy their specific investigatory and reporting needs.

The static images don’t do justice to the Discovery Analysis simple navigation and easy workflows from high-level perspective to root cause is just a few steps. Check out this video to see it in action. What may not be clear in the video, NetAlly handheld tools make the network data acquisition process easy, so more frequent views with the most recent status are easily captured and the uploaded to Link-Live.  

In Summary

Network documentation, whether asset inventory lists or topology maps may not seem like the most glamorous topics. However, as shown above maintaining up-to-date versions are critical to achieving optimal network performance, reduced troubleshooting times, and maximize staff productivity. In fact, when done with proper tools and processes, IT teams need not be overly burdened with excessive tasks to maintain asset list and topology maps. Instead, they will likely see reduced workloads as the value of current documentation quickly frees up time previously wasted on in-efficiently completing day-to-day responsibilities with out-of-date network documentation.