Why Visibility and Automation Matter


In today’s virtualized world, organizations are looking for a single pane of glass – for visibility to user, application and network health, real-time status and performance data that is relevant. Why is this important? And how does this tie into orchestration and automation?

When provisioning applications and network infrastructure on-demand, particular attention is required when responses are slowing down, so proactive monitoring is critical. It’s important to know when an application is not meeting its SLA requirements or security attacks may be impacting application performance. AND it’s important to know these issues before they become a business disruption.

Cost Savings

Not only is proactive monitoring helpful to configure the appropriate technical capability to address the issue at hand; this visibility into application performance is important in terms of cost saving – to de-provision unused resources when not needed. However, effective provisioning requires a clear visibility and continuous monitoring of quality of experience. Tools such as Radware Application Performance Monitoring (APM) provide complete visibility into your applications’ performance with a breakdown by application, location or specific transaction.

Detecting Changes

In many environments the Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are deployed at the intersection of the network and applications and ADCs act as sensors to changing user demands – for example, detecting increased user latency, lack of available application resources or outage etc. The ADCs respond by triggering the control plane – orchestration systems to program the applications or the network elements as needed. This function is important for provisioning on-demand resources but even more relevant in terms of cost saving as many of the error prone tasks are removed and the process is automated.

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In an environment where tenants may share the resources, a wrong configuration change of a single tenant may impact all other tenants – severely impacting an application’s SLA and availability. In addition to architecturally separating these tenant instances, it’s also important in terms of administration to have the necessary tools to automate error-prone tasks.

Providing Expertise

This becomes even more relevant for a set of operations where the operator may not have the necessary expertise – for example, an application developer configuring networks or checking expired SSL certificates across a large deployment. This is where automation comes in. Operator tools build on earlier efforts such as application templates that were designed to address a specific task. Tools such as Radware operator toolbox enable self-service to automate and orchestrate many error-prone tasks to create standard processes as simple scripts that may be embedded in DevOps tools of choice.

Knowing when there is a problem or change in the network and where that problem resides is crucial to network health. A unified console (like Radware Vision) can bring all the visibility, monitoring and automation aspects together from multiple data centers and multiple instances.

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Read “Keep It Simple; Make It Scalable: 6 Characteristics of the Futureproof Load Balancer” to learn more.

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Prakash Sinha

Prakash Sinha is a technology executive and evangelist for Radware and brings over 29 years of experience in strategy, product management, product marketing and engineering. Prakash has been a part of executive teams of four software and network infrastructure startups, all of which were acquired. Before Radware, Prakash led product management for Citrix NetScaler and was instrumental in introducing multi-tenant and virtualized NetScaler product lines to market. Prior to Citrix, Prakash held leadership positions in architecture, engineering, and product management at leading technology companies such as Cisco, Informatica, and Tandem Computers. Prakash holds a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from BIT, Mesra and an MBA from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

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