Applied Observability for Networks Drives Better Business Performance

Even though 2022 hasn’t even ended, Gartner has already charted its top technology trends for 2023. In this blog, we’ll look at how Applied Observability for networks — which Gartner lists as one of the top three trending technology topics in the “optimization” category — helps the organization translate network performance into business performance.

Unpacking Applied Observability

In the past, organizations have had difficulty learning about their systems due to a lack of data. This challenge led to issues for end users and hid the reasons for bad experiences. But for people now living in the “big data era,” the overabundance of data from disparate sources makes it difficult for operations teams to derive the right signals from the clutter and noise.

Applied Observability allows operations teams to aggregate, correlate, and analyze data across multiple layers of technology stacks. They can also view that data in the context of technology tiers and domains, helping organizations derive the impact system performance has on the business. The derived metrics are made consumable to the business and operations users, enabling both manual and autonomous decision making.

Applied Observability for Network Performance

Applied Observability allows teams to derive visibility across multiple domains such as applications, infrastructure, data, and the network, to provide valuable business insights.

Network operations have traditionally been centered around network availability. Specifically, they have focused on monitoring performance to meet SLAs and leveraging network monitoring tools for troubleshooting any issues. Measuring end-user experience has often been less of a factor.

User experience metrics reflect the impact on the productivity of business users or end customers. This in turn may directly impact the adoption, retention, and sales of the organization’s product or service. By harnessing observability, businesses can improve resilience, customer adoption, user engagement, and user experience.

Why Is Applied Observability Important?

The COVID-19 pandemic forced enterprises to shift to cloud-based network strategies. Not only did many adopt SaaS applications, but they also moved enterprise workloads to the cloud.

For example, the pandemic triggered the acceleration of both the adoption of SaaS applications in enterprises and the movement of enterprise workloads to the cloud. Some of the key metrics mentioned below illustrate that trend:

• 61% of businesses migrated their workloads to the cloud in 2020 alone.
• 67% of enterprise infrastructure is now cloud-based.
• 93% of businesses have a multi-cloud strategy in place or in the works.

This change — along with the adoption of software defined networks like SD-WAN — is taking network traffic out of the data centers and into the cloud over the internet.

When enterprises make significant investments in cloud adoption and migration, it becomes even more critical for them to have network and application insights. Obtaining this information is only possible, however, if their network tools and platforms can support Applied Observability. Without it, measuring ROI and course correcting (if required) becomes significantly more difficult.

AppNeta by Broadcom for Applied Observability

AppNeta helps the network team to gain insights on both SaaS and cloud-deployed applications. The solution is able to do this with the help of easy-to-deploy, container-based monitoring points that provide unmatched granularity and accuracy when it comes to monitoring cloud environments.

As enterprises adopt SaaS applications like Salesforce, Workday, and Office 365, insights on the end-user experience have become a key requirement for network operations teams. Accessing SaaS applications over the internet or corporate network requires IT operations teams to isolate the problem domain (internal, ISP, transit, or cloud environments) in order to troubleshoot issues quickly.

For cloud migration use cases, enterprises need to understand performance SLAs of their applications and ensure that they are met for their end users.

AppNeta’s support for both active and passive monitoring brings insight across four dimensions of metrics. These areas include the network path, packets, web app, and flow data. AppNeta integrates the data together to deliver complete monitoring of the end-user experience.