The Evolution of Network Management Solutions: Beyond the Single Pane of Glass

Elvis Chong, Vice President Networking, Bursa Malaysia

Network infrastructure is the backbone of all organizations, crucial for the seamless operation of their businesses. A robust network management system is essential to ensure reliability, performance, and availability.

For the past two decades, we've often heard about the advantages of the "Single Pane of Glass" network management approach. But is this concept still relevant in our rapidly evolving technological landscape? In medium to large enterprise networks, multiple solutions are deployed to meet various requirements. You may have software-defined WAN for efficient connectivity, micro-segmentation for local area networks (LANs), and zero-trust technology for remote access. These are just a few examples. The traditional single pane of glass approach was designed to manage specific parts of the network architecture, but in reality, managing the entire network and security space demands more than just a single pane of glass.

The Cloud Perspective:

With the increasing adoption of cloud technology, every cloud provider offers its native cloud monitoring portal. However, in multi-cloud environments, the operations team must monitor multiple dashboards (e.g., AWS CloudWatch and Azure Monitor). Some companies integrate their cloud instances with on-premises monitoring solutions to reduce the need for additional monitoring interfaces, but this may come at the cost of increased compute and bandwidth expenses.

“In today's digital age, the concept of a single pane of glass is no longer relevant.”

The LAN Landscape:

Managing LANs involves a wide range of network management tools, including NAC (Network Access Control), WLC (Wireless Controller), and load balancer solutions, among others. While vendors strive to integrate these tools into a single management interface, configuring and managing different LAN devices through a single tool remains a challenge.

The WAN World:

The popularity of SD-WAN solutions in the market has grown over the past decade. These solutions typically come with their own central controllers for managing SD-WAN devices, which means additional management and monitoring tools for network teams to handle.

The Security Arena:

Security solutions, such as Network DDoS and WAF, perimeter firewalls, IDS/IPS, Zero-Trust, and micro-segmentation, often come from different vendors. Operating all these security solutions with a single vendor is rarely feasible, making a unified single pane of glass for security unattainable.

In today's digital age, the concept of a single pane of glass is no longer relevant. No single product or tool can effectively manage and monitor the entire network and security infrastructure. Network and security teams face increasing challenges, requiring them to become proficient in navigating and managing various solutions using different management dashboards and investigating issues using multiple tools.

Efficient alerts and notifications are the key to managing this complexity. Organizations must set up an efficient alert system, which can include sending emails or SMS notifications when critical alarms are triggered, integrating with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions, and automating incident ticket generation.

In this era, a network engineer's knowledge is the cornerstone of successful proactive network management. Adaptability and proficiency in utilizing diverse tools are essential skills for navigating the multifaceted network and security environment.

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