“There is a breakdown on the highway somewhere between London and Edinburgh – we don’t know where they are, we don’t know how big their vehicle is, we don’t know what the problem is, but there are lots of important people who aren’t happy – so go see if you can find the issue. Oh; and you have to walk… blindfolded… and the problem started 2 hours ago…”
You wouldn’t expect this process from highway patrol, so why do we allow it in the Network Operations Centre?
Network issues affecting real-time media are the worst. If NetFlix takes a few extra milliseconds to buffer – no one notices, if that important email is sent over the IPv6 network rather than IPv4 – no one notices, if a misconfigured router sends your web request via a small Scottish island one time in a thousand – no one notices. With video collaboration applications everyone notices; and when I say notice; I mean they see it with their own eyes! The picture goes blank, the audio cuts out, lip-sync issues, or the worst of all – your face has frozen on everybody’s endpoint at the worst possible moment…
We are at Cisco Live later this month with the Cisco APIC-EM team; come and see what we are experimenting with which could one day revolutionise the way you visualise your network, automate your solutions and maybe throw in a bit of time travel as well…
Authors
