It’s no secret that IT teams are stretched thin as they manage their daily efforts. Much of that time is focused, not surprisingly, on maintaining network and application uptime and optimizing performance in environments that have become more essential and more complex than ever. In Enterprise Management Associate’s (EMA’s)  spring 2026 “Network Management Megatrends” study, respondents reported that 29 percent of their day was spent troubleshooting the network.

As part of the “Network Management Megatrends” survey, participants were asked to identify challenges facing their IT organizations, and 43 percent identified a major issue with a shortage of skilled personnel. Additionally, hiring network technology professionals over the last several years has become more difficult. EMA has included the same question over the last three surveys: “Does your organization find it difficult or easy to find, hire, and retain personnel with network technology expertise?” In 2022, 26 percent of respondents reported that it was somewhat or very difficult; that rose to 41 percent of respondents in 2024, and it reached 52 percent in 2026 (see figure).

The 2026 report quoted a monitoring architect with a Fortune 500 entertainment company who said “We are being asked to do more with less. What used to be done by a 25-person team, management now wants us to do with a 10-person team.”

Bottom line, network operations teams are spending substantial amounts of time troubleshooting, yet much of the information they have available to investigate is noise and lacks essential context. This challenge is compounded by the fact that hiring more people is becoming increasingly difficult. Enabling more proactive operations is imperative, and automation may be part of the answer. To be clear, the problem is not simply that there is too much work. Rather, it is that too much of IT teams’ time is consumed by work that is reactive, repetitive, and difficult to scale. Additionally, new employees need to be effective sooner in addressing troubleshooting issues such as help desk tickets. 

NETSCOUT has recently introduced nGenius Copilot for Enterprise, an AI-powered, conversational interface that enables customers to gain natural-language access to NETSCOUT Smart Data for faster problem identification and resolution. At a time when finding, hiring, and retaining professionals is impacting many organizations, nGenius Copilot is making it easier for broader IT teams to access, interpret, and act upon the trusted operational intelligence within the nGeniusONE solution.

nGenius Copilot for Enterprise enables users to ask operational questions in natural language and receive clear explanations, relevant visualizations, and detailed analysis. Because AI is only as beneficial as the quality of the data behind its conclusions, the answers in nGenius Copilot are based on NETSCOUT Smart Data, the high-fidelity, contextual intelligence that is derived from observed network, application, service, and user interactions.

Now, experienced nGeniusONE users can investigate issues faster, while new users gain access to advanced operational intelligence from strategically deployed InfiniStreamNG instrumentation. This has the effect of expanding the value organizations can realize from their NETSCOUT investment because it puts trusted operational intelligence within reach of a broader range of IT professionals.

nGenius Copilot helps organizations in a variety of ways:

• Accelerates troubleshooting using natural-language inquiries to direct users from symptom identification to applications, services, and network issues and/or dependencies contributing to the problem
• Extends operational knowledge that helps new staff or less-experienced team members use nGeniusONE’s actionable insights while simultaneously freeing senior engineers to focus on the most complex problems
• Reduces time to knowledge and, ultimately, time to resolution by giving users faster access to critical Smart Data and analysis for addressing outages, performance disruptions, and other service-affecting issues

To learn more about how nGenius Copilot for Enterprise complements and advances NETSCOUT’s strategy to increase accessibility to its Smart Data and analysis with AI-driven operational workflows, please see this recent press release or link to our nGenius Copilot for Enterprise and the nGeniusONE solution for real-time observability web pages.