AppNeta Feature Highlight: Monitoring Policies

This year, we’ve been working hard to introduce monitoring policies, a new feature designed to simplify and streamline the monitoring configuration process. This set of features is a direct result of collaborating closely with our customers to understand their unique challenges. We've listened to your feedback and are excited to deliver a solution that makes monitoring more efficient and user-friendly than ever before. Our enhanced solution enables you to implement observability that can scale to support your highly dynamic environments.

There are a few simple examples to show how monitoring policies can streamline monitoring setup. For example, if your user base splits their time between the office and working remotely, you likely need to monitor internet connectivity from every workstation. In this scenario, you could create a monitoring policy that detects when a Monitoring Point is connecting from a specific address space or subnet in the office. When a Monitoring Point is outside of that address space, monitoring can target the closest Global Monitoring Target. This provides continual insight for users, without additional manual configuration changes. As another example, if a particular business-critical application is used only by users in a particular geographic region, you could create a policy to automatically monitor the application only from Monitoring Points in that region.

A look back

Late last year, the AppNeta team introduced monitoring policies, providing a framework to set up monitoring in a scalable, automated fashion. Then, we added network rules to make it simple to select and tag the networks that should be monitored by a policy. Next up will be monitoring policy groups, which are now available in early access.

Monitoring policies

Monitoring policies replaced our previous path template groups. These policies offered a way to further simplify and automate monitoring within AppNeta.  Pretend you are a network administrator for a user base of 8,000 people. Employees are located all over the world, and every week, anywhere from one to 50 employees may join or leave the company. Using monitoring policies, you can configure monitoring once and have every new user onboarded and monitored automatically according to the policies they match. This saves time every week that can be put back into other responsibilities.

A key goal of monitoring policies is to make sure that monitoring is done consistently to allow for correlation of the scope of a problem. Initially, the solution will offer manual correlation, but steps are being put in place to automate this in the future. For those just starting out, we have a Monitoring Policy Intro Course that describes the process.

Network rules

Monitoring policies have also gained new functionality earlier this year with the inclusion of network rules (read the intro blog). These rules extend monitoring policies and make it simple to select the networks that should be monitored. For many teams, the challenge is that modern networks are complex, with various technologies like VLANs, SD-WAN, and mixed Wi-Fi/wired setups. This complexity makes monitoring difficult and time-consuming for administrators. AppNeta uses Monitoring Points deployed at key network locations and applies network rules to simplify monitoring.

Instead of configuring each Monitoring Point individually, customers can use rules to monitor VLANs, SD-WAN, and wireless environments. The main benefit is that, even if your network configuration is not 100% uniform across all locations, you can still get value from the efficiency that these central policies provide.

Monitoring Policy Groups

Monitoring Policy Groups enable administrators to easily manage multiple monitoring policies with consistent preferences and Monitoring Point rules. This provides the following advantages:

• Consistent setup.  Monitoring Policy Groups allow AppNeta administrators to set monitoring preferences and Monitoring Point rules at the group level. This means that instead of configuring each policy individually, administrators can apply settings across a group of policies, saving significant time and effort.
• Easier updates. With Monitoring Policy Groups, any updates made to the group settings automatically propagate to all policies within the group. This ensures that all policies remain consistent and up to date, with minimal manual intervention.
• Policy overrides. While consistency is key, flexibility remains a priority. Monitoring Policy Groups allow for overrides, enabling specific policies—or even paths—within a group to have different monitoring settings or alert profiles when necessary.
• Flexibility in policy management. As monitoring needs evolve, so too should policies. Monitoring Policy Groups provide the flexibility to move policies in and out of groups easily, so administrators can adapt to changing monitoring needs, without extensive reconfiguration.

Looking forward

Many exciting updates will be made to AppNeta in the coming months. Specifically, the AppNeta product team’s focus for monitoring policies will start with the inclusion of Web Apps. We’ll also be  taking steps to drastically reduce the expertise and time needed to develop scripting for your business-critical apps. Along with many other features, we’re working hard to make Network Observability by Broadcom better and more valuable for customers. Stay tuned to the solution page on Broadcom Software Academy for new announcements.