Visibility and analytics

Manageability is also being extended in today's networks to include the capability to provide complete visibility about the network. This visibility includes providing information about which users or applications are using the network resources, what the round-trip delays from one part of the network to another are, whether the users on the network are communicating with the network resources they should, whether the network traffic at a given point is conforming to an established network traffic baseline or whether there are significant deviations, and so on.

All of this data can be used by network operators to provide a benchmark, and then use tools and processes to ensure that these benchmarks are being constantly improved.