Internet Connectivity Plays a Critical Role: Make it a Part of Your Observability Picture

In today’s digital age, businesses and customers alike are increasingly reliant on internet connectivity for day-to-day operations, communications, and transactions. Now more than ever, organizations depend on ISPs and cloud providers to deliver critical applications and services, making uninterrupted connectivity essential for success.

However, this dependence comes with significant challenges. A recent report revealed that 80% of respondents acknowledged that their organization’s reliance on internet and cloud services creates visibility gaps. These gaps can leave network operations teams unaware of outages or unable to assess an issue’s real impact on users. The situation becomes even more complex in hybrid work environments, where IT teams may struggle to identify which ISP is serving a particular user.

The high stakes of poor visibility

Without the ability to measure and track user experience across internet connectivity paths, businesses face several risks:

• Financial costs of downtime. For customer-facing applications, downtime can result in losses of thousands of dollars per minute, delivering a direct blow to revenue and profitability.
• Lost employee productivity. When employees experience connectivity issues, their productivity suffers, affecting overall business output and efficiency.
• Opportunity cost. Organizations stuck in a reactive mode spend valuable time troubleshooting issues instead of focusing on strategic initiatives. Further, reputation damage from frequent outages can lead to lost business opportunities.
• Eroding customer satisfaction and retention. Customer satisfaction scores can plummet when service interruptions occur. In business process outsourcing scenarios like outsourced call centers, an outage could lead to excessive wait times, causing SLA breaches, penalties, and potential client loss.
• Increased resolution time and costs. Without targeted, complete visibility, teams spend significant amounts of time assessing data from various tools to try and find the error domain. The longer it takes to resolve an issue, the more financial and operational penalties a business incurs.

Operational implications of visibility gaps

Lack of comprehensive network visibility results in numerous challenges for network operations teams:

• Inefficiency. Manual processes are needed to gather and analyze disparate data sources, increasing workload and response time.
• Slow root cause analysis and mean time to resolution (MTTR). Teams struggle to pinpoint the root cause of an issue, leading to prolonged disruptions.
• Inability to optimize networks. Without targeted insights, teams cannot proactively optimize performance, leading to higher costs associated with over provisioning and production issues due to bottlenecks.
• High operational costs. Organizations must invest in highly paid network operations engineers and other specialists to diagnose network issues.

The need for holistic network observability

Given the increasing reliance on internet and third-party environments, network operations teams must establish robust network observability strategies. This includes gaining the following capabilities:

• Unified, cross-domain visibility. Network observability helps teams determine whether an issue originates within an internally managed network or an external ISP or cloud provider environment. If users complain about an issue, it is vital to have an understanding of their location (such as whether they’re working in corporate headquarters, a home office, or a cafe) in order to troubleshoot effectively.  
• User experience monitoring. Teams must be able to track user experience for both internal employees and external customers. When internet issues arise, it is essential to be able to quickly determine if and how users are affected.
• Business context awareness. Identifying network disruptions is not enough—teams must also assess the business impact to prioritize resolution efforts effectively. This includes setting alert thresholds based on the potential impact on revenues or customers.
• Rapid root cause analysis. By aggregating all relevant data in one place, network operations teams can quickly identify the root cause of an outage. This holistic visibility is also essential in assessing the downstream impact of an issue.  
• Continuous monitoring. Ongoing monitoring of internet traffic allows teams to detect anomalies, assess trends, and prevent potential disruptions before they escalate. Toward that end, it is important to do continuous internet monitoring, both from external locations to internal and vice versa.

The solution: Network Observability by Broadcom

Network Observability by Broadcom delivers the powerful monitoring, measurement, and analysis capabilities that enable teams to mitigate the impact of internet disruptions. The solution features AppNeta by Broadcom, which delivers these robust capabilities:

• Comprehensive device metrics. Gain insights into both internal environments and third-party networks, including internet, ISP, and cloud providers.
• Path-level connectivity monitoring. Identify and diagnose issues along connectivity paths with detailed performance analytics.
• Application correlation. Understand app availability from various regions and determine whether issues are caused by the app or the network.

Powerful dashboards and reports for actionable insights

Geographic reports

Within AppNeta, users can access geographic reports that offer a range of powerful insights. Administrators can gain intuitive visibility into network health across different locations, enabling quick identification of problematic regions. From these high-level views, users can quickly drill down to investigate. These reports display SLA performance for connectivity paths over customizable time periods. These views highlight outage-related SLA breaches and performance issues.

Network timeline views

From the geographic report, administrators can also drill down into a specific network path. Users can view connectivity paths between user environments and the endpoint being accessed, whether a user is working from home and accessing an internally managed application or they’re working in a field office and accessing a SaaS service. For any given path, teams can easily see how routing changes over time.

The interface enables operators to track a comprehensive set of metrics, including data jitter, latency, and loss; and voice loss and jitter. Users can view durations and percentages of time that a given path is disconnected, and, if established thresholds for outages are exceeded, the solution can trigger automated escalation to appropriate team members.

Key advantages of AppNeta

By employing AppNeta, network operations teams can gain several important advantages:

• Hop-by-hop visibility. Quickly pinpoint the error domain, whether internal or external, and hold third-party service providers accountable.
• Correlated intelligence. Understand whether routing changes impact user services or if they are merely automatic adjustments by protocols like BGP.
• ISP performance comparison. Evaluate different ISPs supporting a location, identifying the best and worst performing paths.
• User experience impact analysis. Determine whether reported outages actually affect end users, allowing for more informed decision-making.

Conclusion

As businesses continue to depend on internet connectivity for critical operations, network observability becomes an indispensable asset. By leveraging Network Observability by Broadcom, network operations teams can proactively monitor, analyze, and respond to network disruptions—enabling seamless operations, enhanced customer satisfaction, and minimized financial risks.

To learn more, be sure to view our recent Small Bytes webcast, Determine If and How Internet Outages Affect User Productivity.