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The adoption of software-defined network (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) is gathering pace and is expected to increase substantially in the coming years, as it offers both enterprises and service providers access to new resources, ways of working and infrastructure capacity. But with this new power comes great responsibility...

The ability to deliver a high and consistent quality of experience means that businesses must have immediate visibility into their network environment to be able to understand how elements interact and work together - from the fibre cable all the way to the application.

Customer experience in an SDN/NFV environment cannot be considered just from a network point of view. There is data in every layer that makes up an application and each of those data sets tells a different story. Together, they give a holistic view of the service being delivered and how external factors impact on that service over time.

Businesses must also realise that applications are no longer a fixed group of devices - instead they should think of the service as a collection of variables. A workflow needs to remix all of the performance data into the context of the service or applications which the business requests. The performance management solution should connect the dots, show the operations team what is unique and what needs investigating and then map this to the business critical applications and services.

Non-technical decision makers, however, struggle to understand the meaning behind SDN and NFV. These leaders should think of an agile SDN/NFV environment like a car. People do not see a car as an axle, seats, windows, and so on. It is seen as a whole. Infrastructure should be viewed in the same way.

For operations teams and their managers there are three areas that can help them to focus on managing application and service performance in the SDN/NFV environment:

• Strive to show the impact of the infrastructure on the business. In these environments, operations teams must not be as concerned when a virtualised router or application building block goes down. It's now more important to understand when the business needs more reliable infrastructure to sustain business growth.
• When troubleshooting SDN/NFV performance issues, teams should start with broad questions and then narrow their focus. Like a doctor treating a patient they need to eliminate the majority of options and hone in on one or two potential causes.
• Visualisation of performance issues requires a retooling of how businesses think about their infrastructure problems. In the past, if a company had a pool of 100 servers, they'd want to know which server is not performing as it typically does. But with SDN, the question that must be asked is which server is not behaving like the other 100 servers in the pool?

A good example of companies succeeding with SDN and NFV is AT&T, which has publicly been at the forefront when deploying its Network On-Demand service. The company says it has already reduced provisioning cycle times up to 95 per cent in less than a year. To achieve this, it is essential for the performance management platform to make recommendations and provide automated SDN intelligence.

Businesses are moving towards an environment where performance management is provisioned with the application. They should interact with the infrastructure and orchestrate change based on intelligence gathered.

Of course, businesses will be operating within a hybrid infrastructure for some time. This means operations teams need to monitor and manage both physical and virtual estates from a single platform, in order to understand dependencies and the business impacts in these highly elastic and complex environments. It's imperative to future-proof the foundation of the business. NC