Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Patience is a virtue," they say. But when it comes to our beloved Internet, our patience wears thin faster than a cheetah on roller skates. We've all experienced it: that frustrating moment when our network connection decides to hit the snooze button and crawl along at a snail's pace. It's not a complete blackout, but it might as well be. We find ourselves stuck in a digital twilight zone, desperately longing for the days when dial-up was just a distant memory.

Network monitoring tools have a lot of moving parts. Those parts end up getting stored in a wide range of locations, formats, and even the ways various capabilities are conceptualized. With that in mind, we’re going to list out the information you should gather, the format(s) you should try to get it into, and why.

Organizational networks, especially the larger ones, expand beyond the physical infrastructures into cloud platforms, making the network more intricate. This makes gaining real-time visibility difficult for administrators. However, network management tools with IP scanners will help resolve this complexity by shedding light into every nook and cranny of the network.

When it comes to gauging the success of our solutions, there’s one critical yardstick: the value that customers realize in their implementations. While we can tout all our solution’s leading innovations and features, the reality is that they don’t mean much if they don’t actually help our customers in the real world.

While last month’s Enterprise Connect 2024 (EC24) show seemed a bit light in terms of headline news, it did offer one high impact storyline around the integration of AI services with the PSTN. EC24 showcased the addition of AI services, including transcription and meeting minutes, to PSTN call using popular UC services (Teams, Zoom, Webex, Ring Central). While these have been in place for conference calls for almost a year, AI for one-to-one calls via the PSTN is new in 2024.

The biggest driver behind the Internet of Things (IoT) is the value that can be unlocked through data analytics. When you have hundreds, thousands, or millions of devices capable of reporting on an almost unlimited number of attributes, statuses, or environmental factors, the opportunity for businesses to create optimisations or brand new revenue streams is huge.

From infrastructure and chipsets to data solutions and development tools, it’s clear that artificial intelligence will play a massive role in the future of the cloud. Read Justin Ryburn’s latest recap to learn about many of the exciting unveilings at Google Cloud Next 2024.