Network analysis using graph theory is a management tool for breaking down projects into components or individual tasks. Network analytics can offer insight into network operations and detect problems before they occur. Organizations require accessibility, granularity, and visibility to effectively perform network analysis. This can be achieved through robust hardware and software, capturing and decoding capabilities, and automatic identification of network updates.
Network analysis is the analysis of networks using graph theory. The network can actually be a traditional computer network, a home network, a wireless network, a transport network, or a biological network, among others. It often serves as a network management tool for breaking down projects into components or individual tasks and recording the results on a flowchart or network diagram. These results typically reveal information that is used to determine the duration, resource constraints, and cost estimates associated with the project.
Network analytics can offer insight into what is happening at each critical point in the network. Details about protocols, traffic flows and individual data packets can help an organization keep its network operating at an optimal level. Armed with this information, IT teams can detect remote applications and network degradation before they become problems. This helps manage bandwidth more efficiently, improve availability, and minimize time to troubleshoot through fast detection and precise isolation.
The challenge facing many IT organizations is gaining access to the essential information needed to perform network analysis and responding to the extracted feedback accordingly. In most cases, it’s the lack of IT presence at remote sites that hinders in-depth analysis. With the growing complexities of network analytics, organizations may find that to be effective, they require a solution that offers three important qualities: accessibility, granularity and visibility.
Accessibility is a quality that can be provided by robust network analysis hardware and software, which can be deployed throughout the organization, but is typically managed from a remote site. For most businesses, the cost, time and impact associated with sending staff to address technical issues is prohibitive and unacceptable.
Granularity refers to the vision of the project into activities and events on all levels of the network. This means that the solution must include much more than the traffic analysis provided by standard analytics. It must also include the necessary capture and decoding capabilities for network packet analysis.
As far as network analysis is concerned, visibility is achieved by a solution that automatically identifies and discovers network updates. This better ensures that you can maintain accurate analytics without requiring the deployment of IT personnel to remote locations. Visibility can be enhanced by being able to view comprehensive graphs, charts, reports and network diagrams. Such a broad view can give an organization the opportunity to quickly identify and fix problems that exist anywhere within the network.
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