By: Bryan Hamman - NETSCOUT's regional director for Africa

The traditional retail frenzy weekend that is associated with the ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ events has been and gone and many people across Africa are now getting ready for the next shopping wave, as the end-of-year holiday and work shutdown season gets underway. At the same time, IT experts are aware that they are never really allowed to go too deep into relaxation mode - it’s always necessary to ensure that systems and processes remain in place to protect cyber networks while others go on leave and make their way into shopping malls everywhere.

Reliable cyber systems take effort and expertise to create and maintain, and IT experts need to understand how every connection, service, data point and network interaction fits together. As the year starts drawing to a close, it is worth recognising those unsung heroes who keep digital experiences healthy: the IT experts who troubleshoot quietly and continue working after hours, and the team leaders who make sure that their colleagues have the required resources and backup, even during the traditional holiday season.

And so, while many people across the continent take pleasure in entering a busy retail and holiday period, with music heard everywhere from shopping malls to parks and beaches, it’s worthwhile to think about the ‘background music’ that IT experts will be busy with. 

Behind the scenes, their cloud workloads are surging, API calls are increasing, and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is adding even more data to manage. All this busy-ness requires familiar strategies that must be implemented and replayed every year. You could think of it as being like a unique end-of-year soundtrack. And so, in the holiday spirit, NETSCOUT has created a ‘playlist’ for the IT experts who keep networks and applications ‘humming’, to offer some useful guidelines to put into place as the year winds down to a close.

Keeping Observability and Security in Rhythm

While many of us are busy building our playlists for seasonal travel and get-togethers, the people running our digital world are managing other things. Their work revolves around uptime, with patches, baselines and dashboards fine-tuned to keep network traffic and applications running seamlessly as the year winds down.

Retail traffic spikes, streaming usage increases and analytics workloads flood IT environments with observability and security data. The calming hum of data centres gives way to the coordinated urgency of network operations (NetOps), security operations (SecOps) and other IT teams as they manage surging transaction volumes, processing demands and the limits of aging observability tools. And so a change of season requires a change of strategy and behind-the-scenes music. 

Here is the NETSCOUT suggested year-end playlist for IT experts – we are sure that you will recognise them all!

·       Track 1: ‘Patch Before You Dash’: Teams are advised to review operating system updates, firmware changes and dependency patches well before the year-end change freeze. Each update is validated and logged so the baseline data reflects known good configurations.

·       Track 2: ‘Silent Night, Quiet Network’: Every network operations centre (NOC) and security operations centre (SOC) hopes for this track to be a mainstay of their playlist! The silence – in other words, a holiday season free of major incidents - is not luck; it is the product of clean telemetry, tuned thresholds and continuous reviews of observability and security data. 

·       Track 3: ‘Clean Logs, Clear Mind’: This represents the seasonal cleanup track. When unnecessary telemetry is reduced, metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT), along with packet metadata, become faster and easier to correlate, making analysis sharper when the next issue appears.

·       Track 4: ‘Measure Twice, Deploy Once’: Before workloads shift and new applications go live, teams capture baseline performance metrics. Network latency, packet loss, transaction times and application throughput all become reference points for the coming year. 

·       Track 5: ‘The Resolution Remix’: This is the track that turns chaos into rhythm, because with clear visibility into what’s really happening, fixes come faster, dashboards settle into green, and the network’s tempo returns to normal. 

·       Track 6: ‘The Executive Acapella’: Chief technology officers (CTOs), chief information officers (CIOs) and other C-suite leaders plan reviews of overall performance, costs and the business impact of disruptions. They refine priorities for visibility, resilience and security for the new year to keep digital transformation initiatives on course. You could think of it as being a necessary harmony with significant planning behind the scenes to get there.

The end of the year can certainly be a demanding phase for those in business, and they rely on their IT systems remaining both operational and safe. The good news is that NETSCOUT nGenius solutions keep performance steady and predictable, while our Omnis network security helps you find and stop trouble before it spreads. 

For everyone who is required to remain vigilant through the holidays – observing a different kind of ‘Silent Night’, if you will - NETSCOUT is there for you. We wish businesses and organisations an excellent holiday and retail season, and a new year that is prosperous and digitally resilient.