Network outages carry a significant financial and operational impact. From service disruption to reputational damage, the costs add up fast, often reaching hundreds of thousands or millions per incident. Thankfully, there are practical network assessments that can help identify weaknesses and prevent outages from occurring to maintain critical operations without costly interruptions.
According to the 2023 Uptime Institute survey, 54% of organizations lost over $100,000 on their last major outage, and 16% said it topped $1 million. In 2024, the survey showed that the frequency and severity of the outages remained unchanged. Annually, 10 to 20 high-profile IT outages or data center events occur globally, resulting in severe financial loss, business and customer disruption, reputational loss, and, in extreme cases, loss of life.
Despite built-in redundancies, networks remain vulnerable because manual processes and reactive troubleshooting are prevalent. Engineers invest significant time setting up service foundations, but enforcement is minimal. Troubleshooting only begins after issues arise, slowing the response. The core problem is a lack of proactive action and limited adoption of network automation. Recurring issues persist because we lack efficient tools to automatically capture and apply operational knowledge across hybrid environments.
In 2021, stc faced a critical application outage that took almost a month of cross-team troubleshooting to resolve. The costly disruption proved that the company needed better visibility and a strategic incident management approach. The company’s CTO championed an organization-wide solution offering end-to-end visibility and automated incident management across infrastructure and applications.
Today, stc’s data center and design teams use NetBrain’s network assessments regularly for application performance health checks, protected change management, and proactive infrastructure monitoring. Read the full case study.
Network automation is evolving beyond reactive measures. Imagine capturing your engineers’ expertise and applying it proactively across your network without coding? That’s what NetBrain enables. Our intent-based network automation platform enables continuous, no-code assessments of network health, compliance, and change, replacing manual processes.
NetBrain offers a library of common enterprise network assessments as a foundation, while its no-code platform lets you customize and expand these templates to fit your unique environment. Results are easily visualized and shared through widget-based summary dashboards, empowering your team with real-time network insights.
Here are the leading network outage assessments that NetBrain handles in minutes.
At the start of every week, there are reports of network outages, triggering the question: What changed over the weekend, and where did these changes occur? You need to identify these network changes more rapidly and if they share a common origin so you can swiftly address and resolve them to ensure the network’s stability and minimize disruptions.
With a Change Assessment, you continuously evaluate and summarize:
Human error, often stemming from manual network changes, is a leading cause of network outages. To address this, use a network Anti-Drift Assessment to identify deviations from established configuration rules and best practices. By automating the enforcement of these rules, you can significantly reduce the prevalence of human error and safeguard network stability.
The Anti-Drift Assessment encompasses three rule categories:
By automating the enforcement of these rules, you can effectively prevent configuration drift and minimize the risk of human error. This proactive approach not only enhances network stability but also improves overall network performance and security.
Sophisticated network redundancy provides reliable and high-performance connectivity. However, these features, if not properly monitored and maintained, can become sources of potential issues. Continuous network health assessment plays a critical role in identifying and addressing potential problems before they escalate into major outages.
Network health assessment encompasses a comprehensive evaluation of routing, switching, failover, VPN, wireless and error logs.
By continuously assessing these critical network components, you can proactively identify and resolve potential problems, ensuring optimal network performance, availability, and security.
By continuously monitoring and evaluating the health of mission-critical applications, you can identify and address potential issues before they impact users or disrupt business processes. This proactive approach helps prevent costly outages, optimize application performance, and enhance overall system reliability.
Application health assessment encompasses a comprehensive evaluation of various application metrics and components, including CPU and memory capacity, QoS drops, critical interface utilization and tasks such as log analysis and event monitoring to proactively identify and address potential application issues.
By continuously assessing these critical application metrics, you can gain valuable insights into application health, enabling you to optimize performance, prevent outages, and maintain a positive user experience.
Ensure your network isn’t vulnerable according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and CVE Bulletins. From security compliance to vendor recommendations, assess any vulnerabilities and fix them before problems occur. Regular network security assessments are essential to identify and address vulnerabilities that could compromise sensitive data, disrupt operations, or damage an organization’s reputation.
Network security assessments encompass a comprehensive evaluation of various security aspects, including:
By automating these security assessments, you can continuously monitor network posture, proactively identify and address vulnerabilities, and maintain a robust defense against evolving cyber threats.
A comprehensive lifecycle assessment can help you stay informed about the lifecycle status of your network hardware, ensuring timely upgrades and replacement decisions.
By leveraging automated API calls to hardware vendors, such as Cisco, you can get real-time information on:
By applying automation to hybrid-cloud network assessment, you can continuously monitor and assess your cloud networks across multiple cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud for insights into:
By continuously assessing the hybrid-cloud network, proactively identify and address potential issues, optimize performance, and maintain a secure and resilient cloud infrastructure.
The Triggered Automation Assessment serves as a centralized hub for monitoring and responding to network incidents in real time. By harnessing the power of automation, streamline incident management processes, enabling rapid diagnosis, prioritization, and resolution.
Upon receiving an incoming incident notification via API, the triggered automation dashboard applies intelligent auto-diagnosis capabilities:
Automating these critical incident management tasks significantly reduces response times, minimizes downtime, and enhances overall network resilience.
After an outage, evaluating whether similar problems exist elsewhere in your network is critical. Consider if it could happen again in a different location or under varying conditions for every known issue. A problem-based assessment — applied broadly and monitored continuously — helps surface these risks. To truly reduce future downtime, teams must go beyond root cause analysis. They must proactively search for patterns, reinforce weak points, and use those insights to strengthen the network against repeat failures.
By analyzing past outages, organizations can:
By proactively addressing past issues and learning from them, you can significantly enhance network resilience and minimize your outage risk.
Continuous capacity assessment helps prevent overutilization and underutilization by analyzing real-time traffic patterns, resource consumption, and performance metrics. This proactive approach provides visibility to anticipate demand, optimize network performance, and maintain seamless business operations.
Enable proactive planning and scaling strategies by anticipating future capacity needs to avoid costly reactive measures by monitoring these key metrics:
Make more informed decisions to optimize performance and ensure scalability.
No-code network automation is transforming the traditional network assessment from an outdated audit-related task to a strategic, real-time operational tool that empowers operations teams every day. Proactively assess network performance with automated diagnostics and insights, enabling you to identify and address potential issues before they impact business operations.
Ready to start building a more resilient network? Schedule a demo today to explore how NetBrain can help your team prevent outages.