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Customizable dashboards in network management for service providers and enterprise customers

April 8^th 2024, Würzburg

Data is probably the most valuable asset in today’s world, especially in the field of network management. There is a constant search for better and more efficient methods and approaches to collect, analyze and consolidate data. But what good is all this data if it is not prepared and visualized in a clear and appealing way? Furthermore, the visualization requires a customized approach so that different user groups can get the insight they need. Consider the following:

“Dashboard designers struggle with one-size-fits-all dashboarding tools that fail to reflect the diversity of user needs and goals… they are asking for greater flexibility, customization, adaptability, and deeper analytics.” (Sarıkaya et al., 2019, p.9)

This is where user-friendly and powerful network performance dashboards come into play, which not only present data clearly, but also support the further processing of the data.

Top 4 benefits of efficient network performance dashboards

Improved Visibility

Dashboards provide a central, visually appealing overview of your most important network and performance data. This allows you to see the status of your network at a glance and intervene quickly in the event of performance issues, saving you valuable time and resources.

Faster Troubleshooting

With dashboards customized and configured to your infrastructure and needs, you can easily and quickly identify and fix problems before they lead to major outages. Potential security vulnerabilities can also be proactively identified so that your network can be protected from cyberattacks.

Proactive Network Optimization

Network performance dashboards help you to recognize trends, patterns and correlations in your data and identify bottlenecks before they lead to performance issues. This allows you to take proactive measures to optimize your network and improve performance.

Improved Decision Making

Customized dashboards provide you with the visual data you need to make informed decisions about your network and can be individually configured and adapted depending on the user group. This allows you to ensure that every user has exactly the information they need at any given time. This not only ensures a constant and transparent flow of information within your company, but also increases cross-departmental and cross-company collaboration.

What does the perfect network dashboard look like

Network performance dashboards are an indispensable and powerful tool that are often underestimated. Are you wondering how such a dashboard should be structured to meet your needs? The truth is that there is no perfect singular solution to data visualization.

The structure and content of a dashboard depends entirely on your company and your various user groups. When creating and customizing a dashboard, you should not only ask yourself which data you want to see, but also who should see this data (and how much they should see!) and to what end.
No dashboard contains all the metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are most important to you out-of-the-box, but that is not necessary. Much more important is a dashboard solution that provides you with the most important default settings at the beginning so that you don’t have to start from scratch and, at the same time, has the necessary scalability and flexibility to be able to adapt it perfectly to your needs.

Service providers, healthcare, automotive, banking & finance, enterprises – the use cases and requirements will differ depending on the sector or industry in which your company operates. Let’s take a closer look at classic use cases and dashboard views for the service provider and enterprise sectors:

Important dashboard views for service providers

Internet Peering

Internet peering is a direct connection between two IP networks via which data traffic is exchanged. As a service provider, it is important for you to have an overview of the traffic that runs via these peering points in order to find the most favorable distribution for you.

Backbone Performance/Utilization

A backbone is a central component of your network in which several networks converge. Monitoring the performance and utilization of a backbone and between two backbones is an important part of monitoring the quality of your network and services.

CPE Status and Performance

You also need an overview of your customers and the status and performance of your customer premises equipment (CPE) measured, among other things, by port utilization, throughout and availability.

Over-Arching SLA Management

As a service provider that makes services available to third parties, service level agreements (SLAs) contractually define what service customers can expect and in what quality. Non-compliance with these SLAs not only leads to customer dissatisfaction and a loss of trust, but in the worst case can also result in legal action.
The clear rule here is: preventive is better than reactive. A clear presentation of all metrics relevant to your SLAs with individually defined threshold values and intelligent alerting should be the basic component of every performance dashboard for service providers.

Important dashboard views for enterprise customers

Device Health/Inventory Overview

To be able to manage your network comprehensively in the first place, you need an overview of all elements in your network (NEs) and information on their current status. Your dashboard should show you all the information about the network devices, from general device information such as serial number and device type, contract information and runtime to device temperature, CPU utilization and power consumption.

Network & Port Utilization

To ensure optimal network performance, you as a company need to know at all times how heavy your network traffic is (and where!) and whether your ports are too busy to expand your network and/or you must deploy additional ports.

Network Performance

In order to have an overview of the performance of your network at all times, a dashboard for enterprises should also contain an overview of the most important network performance metrics, such as jitter, delay, throughput or the bit error rate.

Network Service Availability & Performance

As a company, you also have a responsibility to ensure that all your services run smoothly at all times so that your employees can work as effectively and disruption-free as possible. An overview of all your services, from voice to cloud, virtual machines to servers and the associated conditional metrics, is essential for smooth operations.

Different views for different users

As previously emphasized, it is not only important which data you see, but also who sees this data. It is critical that several users can access a dashboard at the same time without seeing the data of other users, but also that these users are provided with a dashboard tailored to their needs that contains all the metrics and KPIs they need for their daily decisions. First of all, you need to define your user groups and the data that they should see. These can be different user groups within your company, for example, but also external parties, end customers and stakeholders. Let’s take a look at three classic user groups that require a customized dashboard solution. Of course, these are only selected examples and the user groups can be subdivided and expanded more finely by company.

Network & IT Operation

Your organization’s network operators and engineers rely on a variety of technical parameters and metrics like latency times, data transfer rates, availability and various security metrics at all times that provide deeper insight into the quality and performance of the network.

C-Level and Management

At the C- and management level a global view of the most important services and KPIs is needed, providing a holistic view of the network’s performance in the context of the company’s objectives.

End Customer

As a service provider, you probably have end customers to whom you want or even need to give an insight into the performance of the services they have purchased from you. This dashboard should therefore contain all of the customer’s key metrics.

Finding the perfect solution: the right dashboards for you!

Now the only question that remains is which dashboard solution you should choose. How about a solution that not only collects, analyzes and monitors all important data from your network infrastructure across manufacturers and technologies, but also offers comprehensive dashboard and visualization functions?

At this point, we are pleased to introduce you to our automated network management solution StableNet^®. With its 4-in-1 solution combining Discovery & Inventory, Configuration, Fault and Performance Management, StableNet^® provides you with a powerful tool to manage and maintain your entire network infrastructure. StableNet^® also offers you the option of displaying your data in customized dashboards.

You don’t yet know exactly what your dashboard should look like? No problem. StableNet^® offers standardized dashboard views for this purpose, which can then be perfectly adapted to your ideas and needs.

With our all-new StableNet^® Analytics Portal (SNAP), it is easier than ever to create customizable dashboards and adapt them perfectly to your company and your various user groups. The user-friendly interface allows even non-technical users to quickly find their way around without extensive training.

StableNet^® offers the perfect view for every user!

Interested?

If you’d like to dive deeper into StableNet^®‘s dashboard features and learn more about the StableNet^® Analytics Portal, we’ve compiled some additional resources for you.

Source

Sarıkaya, A., Correll, M., Bartram, L., Tory, M. & Fisher, D. (2019). What do we talk about when we talk about dashboards? IEEE Transactions On Visualization And Computer Graphics, 25(1), 682–692. https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2018.2864903