I'm sure that it doesn't come to you as a surprise when I say that NS1 provides the best traffic steering capabilities on the public authoritative market. With several options to steer user requests to the best possible answer such as based on location, availability, status, cost, priority... we have full control on how to connect public users to our applications.
Traffic Steering Options
What happens if this is not enough, if we want something more? This is exactly what a long term customer asked me a few days ago.
The extra mile
"Slow is the new down", this is what the customer told me. For every 0.1 seconds longer that it takes to load your website, 10% of your customers will go away, and for this customer working in the retail sector, 10% of visits is worth millions.
What can we do to offer the best performance to our customers? What if I want to leverage the data available in the observability tools that I have around my network to provide this extra performance to my customers?
NS1 provides us with RUM (Real User Monitoring) data that gives us a great view of how the endpoints are responding, why should I need performance data from other tools? NS1 RUM data shows you the performance of that particular endpoint, but we don't have visibility of anything around it, we don't get a holistic view of the network, i.e. not only the status of the endpoint server, but also the status of the network in that location, the status of the internet connection, if there are packet drops, if there are too many people connected to that firewall, to that server...
What if we cold put all this together and create a health indicator that is based on the whole network that is impacting that endpoint. If I had that information in NS1, I could definitely steer traffic to the best answer possible at any point in time, improving the performance of my applications dramatically.
IBM SevOne NPM
The same that happens in the DNS market (not all public authoritative DNS solutions are the same) occurs to the observability market (not all monitoring tools are the same). SevOne Automated Network Observability (aka SevOne or SANO) offers you a complete view of the performance of the network including thousands of features such as unlimited scalability, observability of new technologies, AI analytics... and, on top of everything else, SevOne can create custom KPIs based on monitored metrics too. This means SevOne can create a health indicator on how the overall performance of each of the endpoints I've configured in NS1 is behaving, not only considering the endpoint itself, but the whole network around it.
This is too good to be true, show me!
First step, we need to monitor all the network with SevOne.
SevOne Dashboard
Second step, create a health indicator using the KPIs we are collecting from the network.
Custom KPI calculation formula
This is how the health index looks like in a couple of endpoints where I've enabled this calculation:
Server Load
The final step is to send this data to NS1 so it can decide the best answer based on the overall status of that particular endpoint. We will do that using data feeds and using the property 'Shed Load' to load balance the queries appropriately.
NS1 Data Feeds
Traffic Steering Configuration
With this integration between SevOne and NS1, we have provided NS1 with the information it needs to always choose the best possible answer to the user queries, providing this extra burst in performance...that might mean millions in revenue.
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