The Future of Network Operations
Part 1 of a Four-Part Series: The Network Escaped the Network
- By Heidi Gabrielson
- 16-Sep-2026
For years, network operations teams had a relatively clear view of the environment they were responsible for. Users worked in offices, applications ran in data centers, and traffic traversed infrastructure IT owned and managed. Packets, flows, and infrastructure monitoring gave NetOps the visibility needed to understand performance and troubleshoot problems.
That world is disappearing.
Applications have moved to SaaS and the cloud. Employees work from homes, branch offices, airports, hotels, and everywhere in between. Business-critical traffic crosses networks IT doesn’t own. And encrypted VPN and Zero Trust architectures increasingly obscure traffic that traditional network monitoring once relied on.
In other words, the network has escaped the network.
But responsibility for network performance hasn’t gone anywhere. When Microsoft 365 slows down, a remote employee can’t connect, or a critical application performs poorly, NetOps still gets the call.
The difference is that the problem may now exist anywhere between the user and the service, including places traditional network monitoring simply can’t see.
Traditional Network Boundaries Disappeared
The enterprise network used to have relatively well-defined boundaries. Today, the “network” is the entire path connecting a user to the applications and services they depend on.
That path might start on an employee’s laptop over home Wi-Fi, traverse an ISP, enter a Zero Trust service, cross a cloud provider, and ultimately connect to a SaaS application.
Any one of those domains can affect network performance. Yet network teams may have direct visibility into only a fraction of the journey.
So how do you understand network performance when so much of the network experience happens outside the traditional network?
You expand where and how you observe it.
Traditional Visibility Is Essential. It’s Just Not Enough.
Packets, flows, and infrastructure telemetry remain foundational to network operations.
Packets provide deep evidence into application and network behavior. Flows provide broad visibility into traffic patterns across the hybrid enterprise. Infrastructure monitoring adds health, topology, configuration, and dependency context.
NetOps still needs all of it.
But modern environments require another vantage point: the endpoint.
Endpoint-based network visibility extends observability to where users are working, providing insight across remote, cloud, SaaS, encrypted VPN, and Zero Trust environments that traditional monitoring may not be able to see.
Together, these sources create a more complete picture. In fact, our data shows when using cross-domain data, incident identification improves by 400%!
But they also create more evidence to interpret.
Visibility Has to Expand. Intelligence Has to Follow.
Network teams already spend too much time moving between tools, examining dashboards, correlating alerts, searching for context, and relying on experienced engineers to piece together what happened.
Simply adding more telemetry can make that problem worse.
AI changes the equation. AI can reason across network evidence, connect related signals, identify what matters, determine likely cause and impact, and guide operators toward the right response. Instead of requiring an engineer to manually assemble the story, AI can help turn evidence into answers and action.
But AI depends on comprehensive visibility. AI can only reason across the evidence it can see. And visibility only creates value when it leads to better problem identification and faster remediations.
The next evolution of network operations requires both: more complete visibility and the intelligence to make sense of it.
A New Model for Network Operations
The challenge facing NetOps isn’t simply that the network has become harder to see. It’s that the traditional operating model was built for a network that no longer exists.
Modern network operations requires a different approach, one that connects evidence across the entire user-to-application path and applies intelligence to understand what’s happening, why it matters, and what to do next.
That is the foundation of Intelligent Network Observability.
It moves NetOps beyond monitoring individual parts of the network toward understanding the complete experience, accelerating resolution, identifying emerging issues earlier, and ultimately preventing disruption before users are affected.
The network escaped the network. Network observability has to evolve with it.
To learn more on this topic, download the ebook Future of Network Observerability is Here.
