Your network is one of those things that doesn’t really garner much attention until it stops behaving the way it should. Everything just seems to work, right up until the moment it doesn’t and panic begins to spread through the office because emails are down.
That’s the thing about networks. When they’re healthy, they’re essentially invisible. The moment there’s an issue, they’re impossible to ignore. And everything else seems to hinge on it working properly – which is where network observability really starts to earn its place.
Network observability isn’t just monitoring dressed up (although some vendors might love for you to think that). Monitoring tells you when something has gone wrong, but observability tells you what’s happening across your setup in real time. The point is to be able to use observability to spot the wobbles along the way, long before they snowball into an outage that will cause significant downtime.
Is observability becoming a necessity? Absolutely, the stakes are only getting higher. Businesses today are running on more tools, more cloud services and more remote connections – and every single one has a weak spot.
Gone are the days where business continuity meant having a backup generator for “just in case” and a somewhat decent insurance policy. Now, it means being aware of what’s happening with your network at all times because it happens to be the one thing holding your entire business together.
Our Experts
- Simon Lee: Founder at We Are Affective
- Nitish Mane: Software Engineer at Philo
- Shelli Brunswick: CEO & Founder of SB Global LLC
- Dr Tej Samani: CEO of My Performance Learning
- Oliver Moheda: CEO of Total Artist Management
- Dale Jenkins: Founder & CTO at Microsolve
- Antoine Dussault: Product Manager at Tsuga
- Courtenay Mills: Head of Voice & Data at EfficiencyIT
- Nipoon Naresh Donta: Software Engineer at Walmart Global Technology
- Ian Cairns: Sales Director at MSP TalkTalk Business
- Mike Melillo: Sr. Director of Network Observability Products at Broadcom
- Nicolas Leszczynski: Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering, UKI, at Riverbed Technology
- Eileen Haggerty: Area Vice President, Product & Solutions at NETSCOUT
- Antonio G. Corrado: Founder & CEO of MainStreaming
Simon Lee, Founder at We Are Affective
“I’ve been working with various organisations recently where most have a number of different tools that help with visibility into their networks. The problem is that although they’ve got lots of data, most are still loosely connected islands of switches, tools, firewalls, SaaS and cloud services etc. When something goes wrong they don’t always have the right insight to understand exactly what’s happening quickly enough to resolve an issue.
Having a lot of data isn’t the same as having visibility. Having detailed DR plans isn’t going to help if you’re not sure which buttons to press during an incident.
Network observability is a holistic, real-time view into the health of your network. It provides a comprehensive insight into what’s happening in your environment including how data is flowing, where bottlenecks are occurring and the knock-on impact this can have in other areas. It’s a lot more than monitoring!
In my experience the organisations that get observability right recognise it as foundational to their wider DR and BC strategies. It’s the bedrock on which they build their wider estate. It’s infrastructure, and not just another tool! These are the organisations that get up in minutes whereas others are still scratching their heads hours later.”
Nitish Mane, Software Engineer at Philo
“For a live TV service, the network is part of the product. Most of the disruptions we deal with aren’t servers failing. They’re network paths: a router at a partner facility, a carrier maintenance window, or a routing change between two of our own cloud networks. Application dashboards tell you something is wrong. Network telemetry tells you where.
Two practices have helped us most. First, we track each incoming video feed along its full path, primary and backup. On-call can see which hop failed and switch to the backup, often before viewers notice. When a carrier announces maintenance, we move to the backup feed ahead of time instead of waiting for alerts.
Second, we watch traffic on each network path, not just on each service. Last year a configuration change quietly sent database traffic through a more expensive network hop. Our cost review caught it, not our monitoring. When we moved that traffic to a direct connection, we did it in stages while watching error rates. The first attempt caused errors, we saw them within minutes, and we rolled back before customers were affected.
Observability that only covers applications leaves the network as a blind spot during the moments that matter most.”
Shelli Brunswick, CEO & Founder of SB Global LLC
“Space missions demonstrate a principle of business continuity: connected systems need visibility, redundancy and coordinated responses. As businesses depend on networks linking employees, customers, cloud services and suppliers, understanding those connections becomes essential to sustaining operations.
Network observability helps teams investigate disruptions and connect network performance with business consequences. Leaders need answers to practical questions: which customers are affected, which critical services are deteriorating, and where should recovery efforts begin?
Brunswick’s Space Mindset – Build Markets, Build Talent, Build Scale – provides a leadership lens. Protecting markets requires dependable customer experiences. Building talent means equipping people to interpret signals, communicate clearly and make decisions under pressure. Building scale requires understanding dependencies that extend beyond organisational boundaries.
Visibility must lead to action. Organisations should map critical dependencies, establish meaningful alerts, assign response ownership, and rehearse recovery procedures. Backup connections and alternative providers need testing against essential business requirements. Collecting more data achieves little unless teams can use it to prioritise and respond.
Observability cannot eliminate every outage, but it can reduce uncertainty when disruption occurs. Combined with capable people and practiced continuity plans, it helps organisations protect essential services and customer trust. Business continuity becomes stronger when leaders understand what is happening and act decisively.”
Dr Tej Samani, CEO of My Performance Learning
“There needs to be more awareness of how things are connected when it comes to keeping businesses up and running. With all the cloud, AI and third parties that businesses rely on we need to know what could fail and how that would impact our customers.
Schools can experience this as well. If your teacher has one chance to use that resource for that day’s lesson or if your learner is taking an exam. It does not matter if you are back up in an hour; they may never get that chance.
By having network observability, you can dig deeper into where things are slowing down or failing. We should look at it from our end-user perspective. Are they able to complete the task at hand? If they can’t then we are not online. As a business leader, we need to tie this into what actions we can take. Who owns this issue? What kind of alerts can we build that will help us respond? How do we test our DR plan and let our customers know what’ss happening?
It’s not helpful to collect more data if we don’t have someone who will act on it. I think with AI we will see more dependencies added to our products and services. We should start using observability when making these decisions on where to spend our dollars and plan for continuity. If you’re selling to schools, they want to know their students and teachers have access to these tools when they need them.”
Oliver Moheda, CEO of Total Artist Management
“For businesses operating in fast-moving industries such as music, network visibility and business continuity are becoming increasingly important. Artist management relies on a huge number of digital systems working reliably at the same time – communication platforms, cloud-based files, scheduling, financial systems, digital marketing, streaming services and collaboration with labels, agents, promoters and production teams.
When something goes wrong with connectivity or an underlying system, the consequences can extend far beyond an IT department. A disruption can prevent teams from accessing critical information, delay time-sensitive decisions and create knock-on effects for artists, releases, campaigns, live events and commercial commitments.
This is why businesses need to understand not simply whether their systems are functioning, but what is happening across their digital infrastructure and where potential problems are developing.
For smaller and independent businesses in particular, having visibility into systems and identifying issues early can make the difference between a manageable disruption and a much larger operational problem.”
Dale Jenkins, Founder & CTO at Microsolve
“Business continuity is not just about the network being “up”. Ultimately it is about whether people can deliver the services customers depend on/pay for.
With high reliance on cloud applications, multiple sites/remote working, a green network dashboard can very easily hide a non-performing business process. It can be as simple as a monitored firewall being online while staff cannot reliably access a clinical system, process payments or make calls due to an upstream routing issue.
Network observability helps to close such gaps by consolidating network performance, service dependencies and user experience. The value is not collecting more telemetry data; it is providing actionable information on where degradation is occurring, which operations are affected and what is needed to restore service.
This should start with identification of critical workflows, then documentation of the connections those workflows depend on. Latency, packet loss and service availability need to be interpreted against operational impact and end user utility.
Findings must connect to clear escalation responsibilities, tested failover arrangements and practical recovery procedures to develop a true resilience posture within the wider business continuity framework.
Observability is as much a management issue as a technical one. It provides a basis for detecting disruption, prioritising response and validating recovery. A green dashboard is only proof of component status, not that the business can deliver.”
Antoine Dussault, Product Manager at Tsuga
“Business continuity is no longer about keeping the network up, it is about understanding everything happening across an increasingly complex digital estate, and crucially, acting before disruption becomes an outage.
As AI, cloud services, APIs and distributed applications become business-critical, the potential points of failure are multiplying and as such, so are the risks. A performance issue, misconfiguration, unusual traffic pattern or compromised workload can quickly move from an IT problem to a business crisis.
That makes network observability a critical component of resilience. But traditional monitoring is struggling to keep pace. Organisations are generating unprecedented volumes of telemetry, while teams face rising costs, alert fatigue and fragmented visibility across increasingly distributed environments.
Forward-thinking firms are turning to new models in addressing this challenge, adopting AI-native observability, which instead of simply collecting more data, uses AI to identify meaningful patterns, correlate events and expose anomalies across the environment. This helps teams spot potential failures and security issues before they impact the business, reinforcing resilience through ensuring greater control over data, sovereignty, security and costs.
Today’s increasingly complex threat landscape means that business continuity strategies cannot rely on fragmented tools or vendor-controlled visibility. Businesses need to see what is happening across their infrastructure, understand what it means and respond at speed in order to mitigate issues before they become disasters.”
Courtenay Mills, Head of Voice & Data at EfficiencyIT
“Most organisations still assess the health of their communications environment by asking a simple question. Is the network up? The reality is that availability alone tells you very little about the experience your users and customers are actually having.
We saw this first hand with a multi-site customer earlier this year. A carrier identified and resolved a network fault within 30 minutes, meeting all contractual expectations and closing the incident promptly. On paper, everything looked healthy. In practice, the most disruptive period came afterwards. Desk phones across several sites failed to re-register correctly, inbound calling was affected, and different monitoring platforms reported conflicting results. Network dashboards suggested normal service, while call records told a very different story.
This highlights a growing challenge for IT teams. Modern communications rely on multiple interconnected layers, from circuits and network infrastructure through to handsets, call routing and contact centre applications. Looking at any one layer in isolation can leave significant issues hidden from view.
Observability changes that by connecting these data sources together and focusing on outcomes rather than individual components. It provides the visibility needed to detect hidden service issues, establish meaningful baselines and make better continuity decisions before customers feel the impact.”
Nipoon Naresh Donta, Software Engineer at Walmart Global Technology
“In my experience, you cannot protect what you cannot see: comprehensive observability across network, application, and infrastructure layers is what lets teams detect anomalies early, trace failures to their root cause in minutes rather than hours, and maintain service levels during incidents.
As AI-driven operations grow, this becomes even more critical – when agentic AI systems take on operational responsibility, the ability to observe, audit, and reconstruct exactly what happened is a prerequisite for trusting automation. Organisations that invest in observability aren’t just buying monitoring tools; they’re buying resilience, faster incident response, and the confidence to scale.”
Ian Cairns, Sales Director at MSP TalkTalk Business
“Cybersecurity conversations still often centre on keeping attackers out, but that no longer reflects how organisations experience risk. Incidents are now routine, with our research showing that 98.4% of IT leaders have faced at least one in the past two years.
Network observability is one of the biggest factors in how quickly incidents can be brought under control. Across multi-site, cloud-connected estates, a single security incident can present as a sluggish application at one location and an access failure at another. Without clear visibility, teams lose the critical early hours piecing together fragmented logs and working out whether they face one problem or several. Every hour spent investigating is another hour of disruption for the people relying on those services.
According to our research, 70% of UK adults would tolerate no more than a day’s outage for an important service. Observability helps organisations stay within that window by showing teams what is affected, how far the issue has spread and what to isolate first, so they can act before disruption spreads. Organisations cannot contain what they cannot see, and the ones that see clearly are best placed to keep their services running and their customers’ trust intact.”
Mike Melillo, Sr. Director of Network Observability Products at Broadcom
“Modern business continuity is no longer just about disaster recovery or server failover. It’s about delivering continuous, uninterrupted digital experiences across complex, multi-vendor enterprise environments. Today’s enterprises rely heavily on complex hybrid cloud architectures, SASE deployments, and third-party ISP networks, creating unmonitored blind spots outside the traditional infrastructure perimeter. These blind spots have become the single greatest threat to operational resilience.
Ensuring true continuity requires moving beyond reactive troubleshooting to a comprehensive, operational-by-design framework. While AI and operational automation are essential to scaling modern network operations, AI built on poor data wreaks havoc when it drives automated workflows. Continuous operations depend on stitching fault, performance, flow, and user experience metrics into a unified data model.
By tying this data into a holistic, adaptive topology, network operations teams can eliminate cloud-edge visibility gaps and ISP issues that trigger unexpected downtime. Network Observability provides the proactive monitoring required to quickly isolate root causes, reduce alert noise, and remediate performance degradation before it impacts critical business workflows, users, or bottom-line revenue. In today’s hybrid enterprise, network performance is directly tied to overall business resilience, making end-to-end network observability the foundational engine of modern business continuity.”
Nicolas Leszczynski, Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering, UKI, at Riverbed Technology
“An organisation can’t recover quickly from an IT problem it can’t see. That is unfortunately becoming much harder as the traditional network disappears. In years gone by, network operations teams had a fairly clear view of the environment for which they were responsible. Users worked in offices, applications ran in data centres, and traffic traversed infrastructure IT owned and managed.
Today, applications have moved to SaaS and the cloud, while employees can work almost anywhere, and business-critical traffic crosses networks IT doesn’t own. Add to this the growing push toward zero trust architectures, and in effect, the network has escaped the network.
Those blind spots can quickly stack up when business continuity is at stake. When disruption occurs – such as a cyberattack or a network outage – organisations need to understand its cause and impact quickly. The more fragmented that visibility is, the harder it becomes to identify emerging problems before they turn into downtime.
When AI is thrown into the mix, that picture becomes even more complicated. Our latest research found that 96% of organisations say multi-domain visibility is important for AI-driven IT operations, yet only 17% have fully unified visibility across networks, applications, endpoints, and cloud.
Ultimately, a business cannot protect continuity if large parts of its IT estate are in the dark.”
Eileen Haggerty, Area Vice President, Product & Solutions at NETSCOUT
“Business operations rely heavily on the internet. Therefore, business continuity hinges on organisations seeing and understanding what is happening across their networks. When an outage occurs, IT teams must be able to assess the full extent of the damage, identify the root cause and determine a plan of action. But modern networks span increasingly complex ecosystems with every new service, connection or digital transformation. This creates potential blind spots across key infrastructure.
Unplanned downtime can quickly disrupt operations, drain revenue and undermine customer trust. So, network observability is critical to maintaining continuity, giving IT teams the end-to-end, vendor-independent, visibility they need to understand complex incidents, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and build greater resilience into their digital operations.
AI-enhanced data analytics can take this further by helping teams sift through vast volumes of network traffic in real time – not only reaching the heart of the problem but also providing actionable steps to mitigate its impact. By understanding how traffic is moving across the wider digital ecosystem, IT teams can respond to performance and availability issues faster, while identifying emerging threats before they cascade into wider failures.”
Antonio G. Corrado, Founder & CEO of MainStreaming
“As digital services, and video streaming in particular, become more distributed and reliant on third-party infrastructure, network observability is becoming fundamental to business
continuity. Visibility starts with understanding the entire video delivery path rather than
looking at individual components in isolation. Without that end-to-end view, organisations
can struggle to identify where disruption is occurring or respond before it affects viewers.
For broadcasters and streaming platforms in particular, real-time insight across origins,
networks, delivery infrastructure, ISPs and end users, with meaningful analytics on
streaming performance and quality of experience, allows teams to identify emerging
constraints and make informed decisions before they become service-impacting problems.
From a business perspective, the stakes are particularly high during major live streaming
events, where even short periods of disruption can mean lost revenue. Network observability gives organisations the insight needed to identify potential issues early and take action before they escalate. Systems should continuously assess network conditions, enabling businesses to adapt video delivery, maintain service availability and protect the customer experience when conditions change.
Ultimately, business continuity in streaming is no longer simply about having spare capacity
available. It is about having the visibility and control to understand what is happening across the network in real time and adapt traffic dynamically to maintain reliable service when conditions change.”
