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Key Takeaways
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Today’s enterprise networks are a far cry from the centralized, predictable infrastructures of the past. Instead, they are sprawling, dynamic ecosystems that stretch across cloud services, SaaS applications, on-premises data centers, distributed branches, and thousands of end users connecting from every imaginable location. This complexity creates a huge challenge for IT and network operations teams: How do you get a clear, real-time view of what’s really happening?
The fact is, you often can’t—at least not without the right tools. Traditional monitoring might tell you if a router is down or whether a segment is congested, but it won’t tell you what performance is like from the user’s perspective. In today’s world, that’s the only perspective that matters.
That’s where advanced products like AppNeta by Broadcom come in. AppNeta provides end-to-end monitoring that focuses on one thing above all: the actual user experience. By simulating user traffic and interactions, AppNeta helps your operations teams see what users are seeing—so you can get ahead of performance issues before they have an impact on productivity.
Further, AppNeta builds on these capabilities to ensure teams can fully harness the intelligence being gathered. One of its most powerful capabilities is tagging, an easy-to-use feature that brings order, clarity, and context to the massive volumes of monitoring data that today’s enterprise networks generate.
In this post, we’ll unpack what tagging is and how it works. Plus, we’ll outline strategies for making the most of tagging and show how it can be a game-changer for your network operations teams.
Solution introduction
AppNeta takes a unique approach to monitoring: It simulates the network and web traffic of end users. Instead of passively waiting for trouble to emerge, it proactively generates and analyzes traffic that mirrors real-world application use. This provides a consistently accurate view of performance from the user’s standpoint, no matter where that user is located or which mix of networks and domains their traffic may traverse.
That ability to “see what they see” is critical. You’re no longer troubleshooting in the dark or trying to guess what a latency spike on a WAN link means for Workday response times. Instead, you can connect the dots directly between network behavior and user experience.
Tagging takes that insight to another level. With these capabilities, you can organize and categorize monitoring data with context that matches your environment, including applications, departments, geographies, ISPs, and whatever else is most meaningful. As a result, you can filter, search, and group results in ways that make sense for your business.
What is tagging?
Think of tagging as adding sticky notes to your monitoring data. Each tag is a key:value pair—a label you attach that makes the data easier to find, organize, and interpret. For example, you might have a tag like “Application: Salesforce,” “SD-WAN: Underlay,” or “Region: APAC.”
AppNeta supports two main types of tags:
- System tags. These are created automatically by AppNeta and include built-in attributes, such as monitoring point name, device model, path type, region, or ISP. System tags save you time and provide a baseline level of organization from day one.
- Custom tags. These are 100% user defined. Administrators can create categories (like “Department” or “Brand”) and define the possible values under those categories. You can approach tagging any way you need—whether tagging by connection type (VPN, proxy, direct internet), by office type (home office, HQ, regional), or by app criticality (tier 1, tier 2, tier 3).
With tagging, AppNeta gives teams the freedom to layer their organizational logic on top of their monitoring data. This makes it far easier to align technical insights with the way your business actually operates.
Advantages of tagging
Tagging gives your network operations teams a range of compelling advantages:
- Get organized. With tagging, monitoring data becomes far easier to navigate, categorize, and analyze.
- Align with the business. You can shape monitoring views around how your organization is structured—by department, facility, geography, or brand. For example, a hotel chain like Marriott might tag by brand (Ritz, Courtyard, Renaissance, and so on) to track performance according to each organization’s unique standards and requirements.
- Gain deeper insights. Tags provide the context needed to interpret raw data. This helps junior staff glean insights more quickly and it empowers senior staff to make more informed decisions.
- Speed troubleshooting. Instead of wading through large volumes of paths, you can filter and group data to find the root cause fast.
- Boost adaptability. Tags are easy to add, modify, or remove as your environment evolves. Plus, AppNeta continues to expand tag usage, including for automated dashboards and reporting, boosting the solution’s value over time.
Capabilities
Tagging can transform the way you interact with AppNeta data. Tags let you refine, filter, and categorize in powerful ways. Here are a few of the offering’s key capabilities:
- Sorting and filtering in the user interface. Tags give you an additional level of precision. Instead of sifting through hundreds of network paths, you can instantly filter by tags that match your area of focus.
- Filtering by path details. Filter by target or target type to see all paths pointing to a specific application or server. Use network type tags to see how LAN performance compares to WAN performance. Isolate traffic tied to a specific TCP or UDP destination or source port.
- Monitoring status tags. Identify problem areas instantly by filtering paths exhibiting connectivity loss, failures, or threshold violations.
- Grouping paths. Use tags to build meaningful path groups, layered filtering, or comparisons across templates.
- Leveraging metadata and QoS. Tags extend to system-level data and quality-of-service (QoS) information, enabling you to filter by QoS settings or quickly compare priority versus standard traffic.
- Creating regional groupings. System tags already capture city, state, and country based on monitoring point and target location. Plus, you can also define your own regions—like “Sales territory: EMEA”—for even more flexibility.
The end result: You can slice and dice monitoring results to get exactly the perspective you need.
Strategies for success
Here are some proven approaches for effectively leveraging tagging capabilities in AppNeta:
Organize around applications
Start by tagging paths by application type. SaaS apps like ServiceNow, Office 365, or Workday might get one set of tags, while unified communications tools like Zoom or Teams get another. This lets you instantly compare app performance across sites or regions and quickly see if problems are isolated or widespread.
Focus on connectivity and security
System tags automatically capture ISP details using BGP data, so you can compare performance across various ISP networks. You can use custom tags for connection type—such as VPN, proxy, or direct internet. Plus, you can employ tags for security services like firewalls and cloud access security brokers (CASBs). This is invaluable in isolating issues tied to a specific access method or security layer.
Add device and user context
Performance isn’t always about the network; sometimes it’s the endpoint. By tagging based on device type, OS, or manufacturer, you can narrow down whether issues are tied to certain hardware. Similarly, tagging by site type (whether home office, branch, or headquarters) helps uncover location-specific problems, like spotty Wi-Fi at a remote office.
The key is to mirror your operational priorities. Whatever categories matter most to your business, reflect them in your tagging structure so you can zero in on issues faster.
How it works in practice
Within AppNeta, tags can be added, edited, or deleted within the monitoring policy or path configuration areas. Here are a couple of the ways you can work with existing tags in the AppNeta user interface:
Network path view
From the Delivery tab, you can navigate to Network Paths. At the top of the window, you’ll see filtering options. You can scroll through the full list of tags available or simply start typing the desired tag name to find what you need. You can select multiple tags, exclude specific ones, or use pre-set quick tags for even faster filtering.
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Farther down the page, you can also access a field for grouping results by tags. Want to compare by application, region, or Monitoring Point? Just select the relevant tag from the “Group by” menu, and you’ll immediately see performance data organized that way. This combination of filtering and grouping makes it easy to move seamlessly from high-level views to targeted troubleshooting, all without losing context.
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Dashboards
Tags also offer powerful advantages in dashboards. If you want to create a view focused on a single app, simply choose the Application tag and select the app name. If your priority is geography, group by city or custom region. You can even use tags to create a region- or domain-specific dashboard, and set that as your default home screen, so you’re always starting from the perspective most relevant to your role.
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Conclusion
In today’s complex networking environments, visibility is everything. By simulating real traffic, AppNeta delivers advanced insights into end-user experience. The product’s tagging capabilities offer a robust way to most fully capitalize on these insights.
Through tagging, operations teams can more effectively organize, contextualize, analyze, and share monitoring data. Proper tagging can fuel faster triage, more effective reporting, and a deeper understanding of the user experience.
If your team is struggling to make sense of a sea of monitoring data, maybe now’s the time to leverage AppNeta and its powerful tagging capabilities. To learn more, be sure to view our recent Small Bytes webcast, Beyond Basic Filtering: Strategic Tagging for Enhanced AppNeta Network Visibility.
Alec Pinkham
Alec is a Product Marketing Manager for the AppNeta solution at Broadcom. He spent seven years with AppNeta in the Application and Network Performance Monitoring space before joining Broadcom. Prior to AppNeta his background is in software product management in HMI/SCADA solutions for industrial automation as well as...
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