Network brownouts are known to company leaders… Known to zap productivity by 30% and cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The rough definition of a brownout is an unintentional drop in network quality – this differs from an outage.

A new survey from Netrounds of 400 companies with at least 1,000 workers shows another glaring problem. The majority of brownouts are not even discovered by IT. Shockingly, IT is only aware of 39% of these occurrences.

Obviously – if they are not aware of the problem, they aren’t going to fix it. And these outages can be long – seven hours or more at a time.

We had an exclusive interview with Mats Nordlund, CEO and co-founder of Netrounds who told us the company focuses on IT organizations as well as carriers and the federal government.

“Even before conducting the survey, we knew that network brownouts are common, but we were rather surprised by how damaging they are to businesses,” he said. “It is clear that many IT Organizations rely on traditional monitoring solutions that are unable to mitigate network brownouts, as these solutions are looking at network devices and infrastructure, instead of focusing on how IT customers are able to use the network and applications.”

The survey distinguished the top-performing organizations as being 1.5 times as likely to run activation tests from the customer’s perspective before giving access to new applications or network connections. Top performing organizations were also 70% more likely to set up specific active monitoring scenarios for new applications or network connections when they were launched.

“Our survey concludes that network brownouts can be reduced by actively mimic customer behavior close to their locations, across the network and application layers”, says Mats. “Active assurance should be automatically deployed at the same time as applications and network services are being handed over to customers, to ensure any issues are discovered proactively by IT Organizations instead of internal and external customers”.

The company has 250 customers and allows for quality assurance throughout the services lifecycle – from service rollout to day-to-day operations. Mats explained they monitor for expected bandwidth, QoS and allow an organization to react proactively when users are affected. If further works across domains and protocol layers, layers 2-7 to be precise. It also works with multicloud and all public clouds – virtualization platforms as well.

We asked about how AIOps differs from what they do and they explained they can integrate with AIOps – the difference being, their solution allows the understanding of problems from the user’s perspective, which may not be understandable from the AIOps dashboard and alerting system. Netrounds partners with Moogsoft on AIOps.

“The part that the industry is missing is really understanding the network by sending traffic through it and knowing how service would perform if users are on it,” said Cyril Doussau, VP Marketing. He continued, “User perspective is what we give you.”

We are looking forward to welcoming the AIOps community to the second annual AIOps Expo, colocated with SD-WAN Expo and MSP Expo, part of the ITEXPO #TechSuperShow, Feb 12-14, 2020 Fort Lauderdale, FL.