I always wonder "What do customer really want?"
These days I have been working on a seemingly simple feature called IP SLA.
In simple words it provides and end user a way to troubleshoot diagnose real time performance and responsiveness issues for various applications and services and it can monitor network performance continuously reliably and predictably and notify issues noticed in monitoring proactively to end user
Don't go by name IP SLA, as you clearly see it does more than that.
But at it its core it i still a simple feature as you think and there is no doubt about it
But then I was astonished to see how customers are using it. We have a techzone forum where we handle customer queries and issues found in the field by our customers. Thankfully this forum brings us closer to our customers. As a developer we lack application view of how the features that we develop are actually getting used in the field. But at the same it is important for a developer to know this as we can incorporate the lessons we learn when we design our new features and also important to fuel new innovation as without this feedback loop we would not know what actually customer want?
So we thought IP SLA is simple but customer uses it to drive critical application like HSRP.
Customers use IPSLA to monitor active and standby intefaces to drive redundancy in HSRP.
You would obviously wonder why do they not use BFD (Since I work on IP SLA, I'm happy that they are using IPSLA ;-))but my guess is BFD comes at cost of performance which not all end devices can afford.
This is indeed a big shift to use IPSLA to check connectivity to monitor connectivity of an interface continuously to drive redundancy which calls for an extra accuracy and reliability.
So what do customers really want?
An integrated solution which improves build resilient network by combining all the features available (here it was a mix of IPSLA/OBJECT TRACKER and HSRP) and more importantly we need to provide ways to help them achieve their goal in simple way which they can afford on any device on network to penetrate even further in network.
Never underestimate any feature no matter how simple it is and for sure when we say this we don't know for sure how it is used and what it means to customers.
These days I have been working on a seemingly simple feature called IP SLA.
In simple words it provides and end user a way to troubleshoot diagnose real time performance and responsiveness issues for various applications and services and it can monitor network performance continuously reliably and predictably and notify issues noticed in monitoring proactively to end user
Don't go by name IP SLA, as you clearly see it does more than that.
But at it its core it i still a simple feature as you think and there is no doubt about it
But then I was astonished to see how customers are using it. We have a techzone forum where we handle customer queries and issues found in the field by our customers. Thankfully this forum brings us closer to our customers. As a developer we lack application view of how the features that we develop are actually getting used in the field. But at the same it is important for a developer to know this as we can incorporate the lessons we learn when we design our new features and also important to fuel new innovation as without this feedback loop we would not know what actually customer want?
So we thought IP SLA is simple but customer uses it to drive critical application like HSRP.
Customers use IPSLA to monitor active and standby intefaces to drive redundancy in HSRP.
You would obviously wonder why do they not use BFD (Since I work on IP SLA, I'm happy that they are using IPSLA ;-))but my guess is BFD comes at cost of performance which not all end devices can afford.
This is indeed a big shift to use IPSLA to check connectivity to monitor connectivity of an interface continuously to drive redundancy which calls for an extra accuracy and reliability.
So what do customers really want?
An integrated solution which improves build resilient network by combining all the features available (here it was a mix of IPSLA/OBJECT TRACKER and HSRP) and more importantly we need to provide ways to help them achieve their goal in simple way which they can afford on any device on network to penetrate even further in network.
Never underestimate any feature no matter how simple it is and for sure when we say this we don't know for sure how it is used and what it means to customers.
