As networks have become increasingly complex, stretching across data centers, remote offices, and colocation sites and into multicloud environments, a lack of visibility across the ecosphere is creating critical blind spots that make addressing problems incredibly difficult. Many modern observability tools rely on metrics, events, logs, and traces data to provide essential insights into the network. Some organizations are seeing value in enriching metrics, events, logs, and traces with other network traffic data to help overcome blind spots and accelerate problem resolution.

While metrics, events, logs, and traces data tells an important part of the troubleshooting story, observability tools also frequently benefit from another important aspect—the context. The ability to understand the “why” behind performance issues makes it possible to get at the heart of network and application problems faster and more easily. As was seen throughout 2025, it is inevitable that today’s complex hybrid environments will experience costly business disruptions with bottom-line impact at stake. Fortunately, as organizations are finding, NETSCOUT Smart Data can help move them from reactive firefighting to more proactive—and even predictive—approaches that can reduce the impact and sometimes even prevent disruption from happening.

Smart Data Is a Valuable Part of Complete Visibility

NETSCOUT Smart Data provides context-rich intelligence from continuous passive monitoring that enhances existing data insights from metrics, events, logs, and traces. The additional insights that come with deep packet inspection (DPI) includes application response time analysis, alerting, service dependencies, network and application error details, and precise points of failure, which improves mean time to resolve (MTTR) problems and reduces the risks that come from extended service disruptions.

Making a Difference: Real-World Applications

To further illustrate how Smart Data can be a game-changer, we offer a few real-world applications. These examples encompass unified communications and site reliability engineering, as well as the uncovering of unmonitored applications and devices. Let’s take a look at how Smart Data can fill in gaps left by metrics, events, logs, and traces data with response times and other key performance indicators (KPIs) to guide IT teams to the root cause more expeditiously. This is accomplished by enabling visibility into which applications are experiencing issues, the dependencies of applications, which metrics are creating the problems, and the specific location of the issue, thereby enabling IT to identify the problem and obtain the precise evidence needed to rapidly address the issue.

• Unified communications: Most organizations today rely on unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions for vital connectivity and communications across the enterprise, as well as with partners and customers. These systems run on a combination of cloud and on-prem solutions. For UC&C systems to be effective, they need to work seamlessly together across a shared network. If they don’t, users may experience service and application performance issues, leading to frustration, poor customer support, and lowered employee productivity. The bottom line is literally at stake when communications are disrupted. 

  Here’s where Smart Data makes a real difference. This data can shed light on any UC application, such as Jabber, Teams, Skype, WebEx, and Zoom. When problems occur on these platforms, as they inevitably do, a DPI-based approach to monitoring can uncover hidden causes of issues such as quality of service (QoS) problems, bandwidth hogs affecting UC, and failing DNS services that impact access to unified communications as a service (UCaaS) applications, and even pinpoint the source of latency. Smart Data can be used to reveal packet loss that may cause latency, QoS mismatches that affect priority delivery of latency-intolerant voice services, and more, which allows IT teams to identify the root cause and guide troubleshooting efforts. The ability to move quickly and resolve problems faster is key to ensuring the user experience is minimally impacted and business continues unabated.

• Site reliability engineering: As enterprises look to build and maintain reliable, scalable, and efficient systems, the task of site reliability engineering (SRE) teams is to apply software engineering principles to IT operations, focusing on automating tasks, managing incidents, and ensuring high availability for key software services. Without end-through-end visibility across this complex ecosphere, disruptions are virtually inevitable.  

  Smart Data is key to SRE success, enabling automation to reduce mistakes and speed up mediation. It provides real-time visibility to improve incident response. And it can be used to custom tailor metadata feeds to deliver the right information at the right intervals to help improve response when problems arise. It can also help to track critical Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) metrics in minute detail, such as retransmission, latency, failures, bytes in/out, and more. Further, the depth of details that come from NETSCOUT Smart Data includes KPIs for applications and protocols critical to SRE teams. These include web services (HTTP and HTTPs), databases (SQL and MQ), and enabling protocols such as DNS, active directory, and DHCP.

• Unmonitored applications and devices: All too often, employees or teams adopt tools or services on their own to meet business and competitive needs tied to customer services, sales efforts, and marketing initiatives. This creates significant problems for the IT organization. IT teams can’t manage, control, or secure what they can’t see. This is a formula for chaos.  

  Fortunately, Smart Data can empower IT teams to see when users are leveraging unapproved services (i.e., VPN proxies, etcetera), using unapproved software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications (AI bots, for example), or employing nonsanctioned cloud storage for corporate documents (i.e., Google Drive, Dropbox). NETSCOUT Smart Data, with the ability to recognize more than 3,000 applications including voice, video, data, SaaS/UCaaS, web-based, and custom services, helps organizations identify new applications and track their performance, utilization, and impact on broader corporate services. While the presence of unmonitored applications and devices is less than ideal for the overall efficiency of the IT organization, Smart Data provides invaluable observability that is essential for regaining control.

The Undeniable Power of Smart Data

It is impossible to ignore the power of Smart Data in gaining the observability needed to maximize network performance. This solution extends the value of traditional metrics by overcoming potential gaps in visibility. This “better together” approach, which leverages critical insights from both metrics, events, logs, and traces alongside Smart Data from DPI at scale succeeds in delivering insights needed to truly understand where problems are occurring, anywhere in the network for any application.

See NETSCOUT Smart Data in action—take our observability test drive.