Accelerate Network Incident Response With AppNeta, Automic Automation, and ConnectALL

Enabling accurate exchange of information between key applications has become crucial in today’s hybrid and complex IT operations. When we speak with potential customers, one common question we hear is, “How easy is it to consume and integrate the insights generated by Network Observability by Broadcom?” This might sound like table stakes, but it is often a challenge due to siloed teams, the high levels of expertise required, different data formats, and time-consuming processes. This is particularly true when teams are working to integrate network insights into their automation implementations.

This blog illustrates ConnectALL's value in bridging the gap between network observability and automation, revealing how the solution makes integration simple, fast, and secure.

Network observability in modern IT operations

Network observability solutions produce a large number of events, including due to configuration changes, faults, performance events, anomalies, and so on. These events need to be correlated, filtered, and clustered to make network operations more manageable. Today, teams need to reduce the time spent understanding and reacting to network incidents by modernizing incident response and making it as agile and automated as possible.

Automating incident response

According to the EMA report, “Network Management Megatrends 2024,” when it comes to improving operational efficiency, incident response is the most important aspect of a network observability.

By connecting network insights with automation solutions, teams can gain these key benefits:

• Build bridges across silos by connecting your network and automation teams. Leverage a single pane of glass that provides aggregated visibility of information from across value streams.
• Increase collaboration between teams leveraging different tools in distributed environments.
• Optimize and accelerate the network operation center’s (NOC) response to network incidents that have an impact on the business.

Continue reading to learn how ConnectALL can help transform observability insights into automated workflows for rapid, cost-effective remediation.

Proactively detecting network incidents

On the network observability side, AppNeta empowers IT and network operations teams with actionable insights, offering a combination of active synthetics and passive traffic analysis. With the solution, teams can automatically pinpoint network or application problems, regardless of where they occur.

To provide these insights, AppNeta monitors the entire network path, delivering full, end-to-end visibility and enabling fast identification of the domain responsible for the degradation. Let’s examine the events and activities involved in incident detection below.

Fig 1: AppNeta delivers proactive visibility beyond internally managed networks

AppNeta has proactively detected and diagnosed data loss for users in Denver who access Microsoft Teams. To prevent business disruption, the NOC must be agile in notifying team members, mitigating issues, and, when possible, repairing problems. Let’s examine the events and activities involved in incident detection and outline some useful actions that can be automated to promote the agility of NOC teams.

Automating responses for agile network operations

Shifting to the automation side, Automic Automation empowers SRE teams to standardize and automate operating procedures, diagnostics, and remediation. Automic goes beyond traditional workflow automation, automating end-to-end business processes to significantly reduce costs, save time, and mitigate risk.

Based on rich diagnostic information AppNeta provides, we can respond to these incidents by automating the following actions:

1. Sending targeted notifications to Microsoft Teams users working in the Denver office.
2. Submitting targeted notifications to IT teams in the Denver office, so they can investigate, for example, to correlate a local network configuration change with the degradation of the Microsoft Teams service.
3. Issuing an API call to Microsoft and the Denver office’s ISP to collect service status, and then using that data to enrich ticket information with reported outages of externally managed networks.
4. Creating quality tickets, with an audit trail of the troubleshooting already performed.
5. If the issue persists, Denver users can automatically be re-routed to a different VPN hub to mitigate the incident or optimize the connection.

Fig 2: Potential Automic workflow for network incident response

Automating some or all of these workflows will add tremendous value to any organization, reducing mean time to repair (MTTR) and freeing up time of your NOC.

Connecting network observability and automation with ConnectALL

We have seen the power of network observability and automation in isolation. Let's find out how we can multiply the value by connecting both capabilities together. Specifically, we will use ConnectALL to synchronize AppNeta events and Automic. Here are some key advantages of using ConnectALL:

1. ConnectALL is designed for enterprise integration scenarios. It has robust error handling, logging, versioning, and alerting mechanisms.
2. The solution offers native enterprise security features (including encryption, role-based access, and audit trails) that are not readily available with custom integrations.
3. ConnectALL offers a configurable, user-friendly interface that enables no-code/low-code set up, drastically reducing maintenance effort.
4. The solution offers flexible, adaptable integrations that reduce total cost of ownership. ConnectALL offers dozens of integrations, so it is very straightforward to expand beyond AppNeta and Automic. With the solution, teams can easily add new integration endpoints, such as Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and more.

The image below shows the high-level workflow:

Fig 3: Seamlessly connecting network events with automation

The first step would be to send AppNeta network incidents to ConnectALL. AppNeta is very flexible for outbound notifications, offering support for email, traps, and APIs. For this use case, we will leverage the AppNeta API to easily push these events to the AppNeta connector in ConnectALL.

Configuring AppNeta event integration involves specifying the URL of the system (in this case, ConnectALL) that you want to send events to and the type of events you want to send.

The second step is to use the ConnectALL AppNeta Universal Adapter to receive the incoming event webhook and invoke the incident response Automic workflow.

Here, ConnectALL can do much more than forwarding: Users can apply business rules and filters (for example, skip low-priority alerts), enrich metadata (ensuring the automation platform receives richer, more actionable data), and extend the integration to other enterprise systems, such as ServiceNow, Jira, and Splunk.

The third and final step is the Automic business process execution triggered from ConnectALL and in context with AppNeta event information. Here is where the magic happens: Automic can orchestrate any standard operating procedure (like the one described above for the Microsoft Teams degradation affecting Denver users) to accelerate and enhance network operations.

Drawing it all together: Faster, more secure, and more reliable automation of critical network events

By leveraging ConnectALL as the integration layer between AppNeta and Automic, customers can improve agility, break down silos, and achieve faster and more reliable automation of critical network events. The immediate benefits are driving down MTTR and boosting operational efficiency. Ultimately, these combined solutions provide a scalable IT infrastructure that’s ready for the future and that delivers measurable business value through reduced costs and enhanced productivity.

At Broadcom, we enable large enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations. Offering capabilities for network observability, automation, and value stream management, our portfolio is designed to propel business and infrastructure transformation. We hope this article helps you maximize the value of our solutions.