A new survey concludes that the amount of time spent on network troubleshooting — particularly for wireless networks — is a major challenge for network professionals and prevents them from pursuing more strategic efforts.
Forty-three percent of survey participants reported that they had difficulty finding time to pursue strategic business initiatives, because were were “mired in the time-consuming task of troubleshooting issues across the entire network,” according to the report, which was commissioned by network performance management company LiveAction and conducted by Sirkin Research.
Sirkin said that the amount of time spent on network troubleshooting “appears to be caused in large part by the massive complexities found in today’s multi-fabric, multi-vendor and multi-cloud network environments” as well as a lack of sufficient visibility, management and control from monitoring solutions.
Among the other findings of the survey:
-38% of survey respondents reported that they could not proactively identify network performance issues.
-35% said that they had poor visibility and monitoring capabilities across all fabrics of the network, and 35% also reported poor end-to-end monitoring across network devices.
-34% described the inability to analyze historical captured data for root cause analysis as either a challenge or a major challenge.
-30% of the survey participants said that they were spending “too much time managing cumbersome workflows between critical systems.”
-22% said that too many network performance tools made it hard to quickly troubleshoot issues.
Nearly all of the survey participants said that their issues originated in wireless networks; cloud or multi-cloud were the second source of issues, followed by branches or remote sites.
The survey’s data is based on responses from more than 200 respondents; it was sent to network and IT professionals who are mostly in enterprises with at least 1,000 employees, according to Sirkin Research.
