Accelerate Problem Solving with Full-Stack Observability

In recent years, observability has become a crucial capability for IT teams to integrate into their technology stacks. Many organizations seek clarity on the differences between observability and automation; while distinct, these concepts are closely related. The primary goal of observability is to facilitate automation by providing enhanced visibility into IT errors, events, and incidents.

Full-stack observability builds upon traditional network and systems monitoring, allowing IT teams to resolve issues more quickly. As organizations strive to achieve more with fewer resources, this capability becomes increasingly vital. Automating issue resolution can significantly extend the effectiveness of small IT teams.

Problem-Oriented: Adds Background Information to Telemetry data

Typically, alerts received by IT teams from technology resources, such as those in network operating centers, lack context, making it challenging to understand the actual problem. As a result, employees often only intervene when problems escalate to affect customer experience or other critical areas. At this point, a positive response based on the problem is very important. If the lack of contextual information leads to various departments denying their responsibility, this will only affect the efficiency of problem-solving.

The next generation of observability addresses these challenges by adding contextual information to telemetry data. For instance, if a construction crew accidentally cuts a fiber cable, causing a data center outage, alarms will trigger everywhere. Observability allows relevant data to be fed into a context-and-correlation engine, identifying the root cause: the internet is down, prompting the wide area network team to resolve the issue while everyone else resumes work. This shift fosters a culture focused on resolution rather than blame.

While a dark data center requires human intervention, other issues can be managed by automated tools. For example, if an organization's cloud instances are overtaxed, an automated solution can detect resource shortages and automatically provision additional resources. When organizations reach the stage of automating such workflows and making real-time adjustments, they can start resolving issues before they impact the business.

Powerful Network Management Solution: AmpCon™

As data centers continue to evolve, there is an increasing focus on network management solutions that accelerate problem resolution. The FS AmpCon™ management platform is a powerful network management solution that can better adapt to the current trend of network observability and automation:

• Automate end-to-end network lifecycle management: FS AmpCon™ enables complete management and ongoing maintenance of network devices and components. With end-to-end network lifecycle management, it automates resource allocation, maintenance, compliance checks, and upgrades to prevent configuration errors and downtime. This feature ensures efficient and stable network operation, providing a simplified and comprehensive management solution.

• Increase IT efficiency and accelerate service delivery: The AmpCon™ management platform automates the tedious tasks associated with common network operations, such as configuration backups, configuration updates, RMA replacements, scheduled software upgrades, custom (user-defined) workflows, and switch visibility (port statistics, health checks). This increases IT productivity and speeds up service delivery.

• Achieve optimal automation efficiency with agentless Ansible action manuals: The AmpCon™ management platform provides common features for daily network operations and supports custom workflows using the Ansible playbook for scheduled tasks and easy-to-read reports. It can use Ansible for remote automatic configuration and management of switch devices, and realize the most basic configuration management operations through the built-in network module.

• Intuitive and efficient network management: FS AmpCon™ allows administrators to deploy hundreds or thousands of open network switches running PicOS® using a simple and user-friendly GUI. Administrators can define global configurations as well as site-or region-specific variants and associate them with individual switches. After the switch is installed and powered on at the remote site, the automatic connection script automatically downloads the specified configuration to the switch and performs validation and software updates. This simplifies the process of large-scale switch deployment, improving deployment efficiency and consistency.

Increase Visibility and Automation with Your Partner FS

As a professional communications equipment and solutions provider, FS is committed to providing high-performance data center switches and a dedicated team of modern solutions. FS PicOS® switches utilized AmpCon™ can help you improve network visibility and make network management more intuitive and efficient while enabling network automation to reduce labor costs, improve operational efficiency, accelerate service delivery, reduce operational risk, and make problems easier to resolve quickly.