How End-to-End Visibility Can Help with IT Migration

Migrating services from one platform to another can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to ensuring that IT migration doesn’t disrupt end-user experience. That’s where end-to-end visibility comes in. Actually, it is the very key if IT team wants to migrate services smoothly, validate migration success and sleep well in the night during the project. In this blog, I’ll cover two use cases to demonstrate how Cisco ThousandEyes can help with IT migrations.

Don’t run your migration blind, if you can see

During an IT migration, several moving parts need to work together seamlessly, whether it is datacenter, core network, Lan, SaaS application or cloud migration. Network infrastructure, servers, applications and data all need to be migrated to the new platform without any disruption to end-users. Disruption during the process can lead to frustration and increased number of it tickets opened, lost productivity, and even lost revenue.

Instead of blindly trusting that the user experience is fine, you’d rather see and quickly identify any issues that may arise during or after the migration, right? Cisco ThousandEyes provides end-to-end visibility on digital experience, including all layers and different domains between users and applications or services. It allows you to monitor the performance of your IT services before, during and after the migration. It uses path visualization to pinpoint any issue or disruption in real-time, helping you to manage your migration project to be successful.

How do you validate your success?

After your migration is complete, it’s important to validate its success. Most likely you need to provide evidence with metrics for key stakeholders, too. Surely you want to ensure that migrated services are working as expected, and that end-users are not experiencing any issues? Validating the success can be time-consuming or even impossible with current monitoring tools, especially if you have many services that need to be migrated. If service quality is degraded, how would you exclude all 3rd party services as the root cause of the issues if you don’t have the visibility? Holistic end-to-end visibility that reaches beyond your own environment is needed to understand possible changes from all domains and layers.

You can use Cisco ThousandEyes to monitor digital experience before migration, to establish a baseline for different metrics in each layer that impact the digital user experience. Once monitoring continues after the migration, ThousandEyes automatically provides detailed reports for pre and post migration that allows you to validate the success of the migration. And identify any areas for possible improvement.

Ease of use and repeatable monitoring from migration to another

Monitoring tools used today rarely provide end-to-end visibility for all the domains and layers impacting digital user experience. Typically multiple different tools are needed, but then providing that single pane of class, time correlating different data from multiple sources becomes challenging and time consuming. ThousandEyes deployment and use is extremely simple, easy and quick so that you and your busy team can focus efforts on what matters the most. Once you’ve created the dashboard template, you can re-use it in number of other migrations and use cases. With few days of efforts, you can create procedure and templates that you can repeat even faster with next migrations.

Ensure successful migration with minimal disruption

IT services can be a complex and challenging task, but it can save a lot at the end of the day to invest in end-to-end visibility that ensures a successful migration with minimal disruption to end-users. Cisco ThousandEyes can help IT teams monitor the performance of their IT services during and after the migration. Additionally, it provides detailed reports that allow IT teams to validate success and identify areas for improvement.

If monitoring business critical environments during migrations with different set of monitoring tools have been time consuming and haven’t provided the true, full visibility for digital experience, ThousandEyes may well be the game changing solution. It helps you to save time used for information gathering, but it also gives the confidence for you and your team to perform migration faster, backed up with monitoring that mitigates the risks and increases the resilience of your digital business health. It may well fully change for the better how migrations are prepared, monitored and evaluated.