Getting Out of the 2010s Era of Alarm Avalanches

Between on-premises data centers and private, public, and hybrid clouds, today's networks have never leveraged a more comprehensive range of technologies, nor have those technologies been this interconnected. The result is that networks are now far more capable than ever before, and are able to augment their capabilities by leveraging other technologies to their highest and best use.

However, the rapid expansion of new technologies and interconnectivity across the network has significantly increased the number of alarms the infrastructure and operations (I&O) team receives each day. And because the network has never been spread wider, tracking down the issue causing each alarm and remediating it now takes longer than ever.

The 2010s Way: The Rise of the Alarm Deluge

Network admins first started complaining about alarm overload in the 2010s as the cloud, DevOps practices, and CI/CD became standard practice across I&O organizations.

While this helped their enterprises work with more speed and agility, the result was a significant uptick in alarms, with each one requiring minutes or hours to validate, triage, diagnose, and remediate.

And that’s just the legitimate alarms. Network admins also suffered from a wave of false positives that, while not ultimately indicating an issue that could cause damage, still required time to chase down and inspect before they could be safely disregarded.

As a result, the critical alarms that required an all-hands-on-deck response would often get drowned out by the false positives or minor alarms that could safely be placed on the back burner. Without a way to easily validate, prioritize, and remediate the issues causing alarms, the value of the alarm itself was significantly degraded.

The 2023 Way: Network Automation

As networks scale and become more dynamic, a manual approach to alarms no longer cuts it. With network automation, I&O teams can leverage a scalable approach to alarm management by allowing technology to track and respond to alarms without human intervention.

By enabling auto-remediation, I&O teams can leverage automation to take an initial look at every alarm that is raised to weed out false positives. With just that one step, a significant number–if not the outright majority–of alarms will go silent from the perspective of the I&O team, allowing them to focus their time and effort on remediating the true alarms that do come in.

But why stop there? Auto-remediation can also take on the bulk of the busy work that makes up the remediation process, including triage, diagnosis, and remediation. This further eliminates a substantial number of alarms while ensuring those issues are solved quickly and effectively.

What’s left are the serious, heavy-duty alarms that require the expertise and attention of your I&O team–exactly the types of alarms you want your team to focus on.

The time for I&O teams to make a change and adopt network automation is now. To learn more, download our latest eBook, Trapped In Time: 3 NetOps Practices to Modernize ASAP.