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5 Signs You Have a Network Poltergeist

  • Difficulty documenting, troubleshooting, and securing the network – paired with everchanging complexity – can make it seem like your network has a mind of its own. But as Halloween approaches, what signs should network teams look for to know if their network is behaving properly or showing signs of a network poltergeist?

    While your network doesn’t have a head (or a body to spin it around), there are several ways to examine if your system is truly haunted. Click through our slideshow, if you dare, to determine if you have a network poltergeist.

  • Chaos during a network integration

    When you’re haunted by the network poltergeist, anything in your NetOps strategy that can go wrong, will. Mergers and acquisitions are hard enough on their own when you consider the sheer size of the networks that need to be combined and the resources needed to ensure business continuity through the process. If you have a poltergeist, you’ll likely have trouble identifying missing information or fortifying limited documentation of the acquired network infrastructure. You may even spend countless hours painstakingly documenting the network only to realize you made a misstep – leading to outages that severely impact network performance. Spooky.

  • Batty for blind upgrades

    Safe to say you didn’t see this one coming. Blind upgrades are every network team’s worst fear – and the network poltergeist may be to blame. Your network might be haunted if you can’t get an accurate view of your entire network. Whether it’s just too big to document properly in one sitting or too complex to manually troubleshoot issues, your network poltergeist will exacerbate these issues and then ghost as soon as you think you’ve found a solution.

  • Complex conundrums with new tech

    Shouldn’t SDN, SD-WAN, and other network technologies be easy to deploy? For IT departments haunted by the poltergeist, the answer is often no. Most IT teams enjoy the benefits of modern network tech, created to give engineers a centralized view of their entire network and make troubleshooting and management more efficient and cost-effective. However, during the Halloween season, those running into issues implementing new technologies may be facing otherworldly obstacles, like managing the complexities of their hybrid network.

  • When MTTR never decreases

    A sign of a solid network management strategy is low Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), but what happens when the MTTR never gets better? Manual processes like the command-line interface already cost network engineers a large percentage of IT time repairing and troubleshooting the network. Making matters worse, the poltergeist slows this process even further by decreasing visibility into the network, cursing engineers with access only to outdated maps – yikes!

  • Plug-and-pray to the Poltergeist

    Poor change management is the stuff of network nightmares. Engineers who employ the plug-and-pray approach when making network changes, hoping that there will be no misconfigurations, are the likely victims here. The poltergeist often lies in wait for teams to make a single misconfiguration, throwing the network into a long, costly outage or continuous performance issues.

  • Don’t fear! Let’s cheer. Automation is here

    This Halloween, you don’t have to be tricked by the network poltergeist – let automation treat you to an easier, more efficient network management strategy that keeps the Poltergeist at bay. Network engineers, the choice is yours: Invest in automation, or let network issues haunt you forever.