TCP Monitoring With AppNeta: Why Expanded Support is a Game Changer

Broadcom continues to expand the capabilities of AppNeta by Broadcom, offering ongoing enhancements in features and value. With the introduction of TCP protocol support, users can now achieve more streamlined setup processes and deeper visibility into modern network paths. These enhancements help eliminate blind spots and improve monitoring accuracy across complex network environments. Review this post to learn more about these valuable new capabilities.

Introduction

As organizations continue to grow increasingly reliant on third-party networks, including cloud services and ISPs, the challenges confronting network operations teams continue to mount. A staggering 75% of teams report blind spots when troubleshooting issues across modern network delivery paths. For years, AppNeta has been a trusted solution for eliminating these visibility gaps, ensuring network operations teams can effectively monitor and optimize performance across their networks.

AppNeta: Key capabilities

AppNeta provides full-stack visibility by aggregating and correlating network and application data. This enables end-to-end visibility across user devices and ISP, cloud provider, and virtual private cloud (VPC) networks. With these capabilities, AppNeta provides comprehensive insights into network performance.

The platform offers both active and passive monitoring capabilities, capturing real-time network data through continuous active testing. It tracks network path changes over time, allowing teams to analyze incidents retrospectively and gain a deeper understanding of network performance.

With continuous active testing, AppNeta monitors network paths over time to detect deviations and provide historical data, enabling teams to pinpoint when and where issues originated. This proactive approach helps network operations teams identify and address network problems before they affect end users.

Background: Deployment options

When deploying AppNeta, customers have two key monitoring configurations to choose from:

• Single-ended. Single-ended monitoring is used when teams can’t, or don’t want to, install Monitoring Points at both ends of the path. For example, if a team relies on a SaaS app, the network operations team will not be able to install a Monitoring Point in the SaaS provider’s environment.
• Dual-ended. Dual-ended monitoring is utilized when Monitoring Points can be installed on both ends of the network path, providing comprehensive insights and a more complete picture of network performance.

ICMP limitations

Historically, AppNeta has relied on the ICMP protocol for single-ended monitoring. While ICMP remains valuable for route determination, it presents a couple challenges:

• Limited cloud visibility. One major limitation is reduced visibility in cloud environments. Some cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure, block ICMP traffic, restricting visibility into network paths. While AppNeta has provided monitoring endpoints in Azure for dual-ended monitoring, this option is not universally available for all cloud environments.
• Blocking. Another significant challenge is server-side blocking. ICMP traffic is increasingly blocked by firewalls, security proxies, and content inspection services. As a result, single-ended monitoring that relies solely on ICMP often encounters obstacles, which can limit its effectiveness in certain environments.

Announcing TCP support

To address these limitations, Broadcom has introduced support for active TCP-based monitoring in AppNeta. This capability is available in early access now. This enhancement enables organizations to gain deeper visibility into their network paths, while avoiding the challenges associated with ICMP.

Advantages of TCP-based monitoring

With the introduction of TCP support, AppNeta upgrades its single-ended monitoring capabilities, offering these advantages:

• Enhanced accuracy. TCP monitoring provides improved accuracy by interacting directly with real TCP servers, using the same protocol as applications. This approach more accurately reflects actual web traffic behavior, offering more relevant and precise insights into network performance.
• Expanded visibility. TCP-based monitoring expands visibility into complex and heavily secured environments. Unlike ICMP, which is often blocked in cloud environments, TCP can traverse all hops on the path inside the cloud, providing a comprehensive view of network traffic. This allows teams to see how intricate these paths can be and gain granular intelligence about where issues are located. AppNeta’s TCP monitoring offers detailed metric collection, capturing route information, data loss, jitter, round-trip response times, and more.
• Simpler onboarding and configuration. Another key benefit of TCP support is the simplification of onboarding and configuration. While ICMP-based monitoring often requires interactions between network and security teams to configure firewall settings, TCP monitoring eliminates this hurdle. Since it runs over commonly used HTTPS ports, no firewall configuration changes are needed. This significantly speeds up the deployment process, reducing delays and making onboarding more efficient.

How it works

Setting up TCP-based monitoring in AppNeta is straightforward. Within the AppNeta interface, users navigate to the settings menu, select “Monitoring Policies,” and choose the option to create a new policy. From there, they simply enter the global monitoring target and policy name, select the appropriate monitoring device, and configure internet preferences for single-ended or dual-ended monitoring. When users set up new single-ended paths, AppNeta defaults to TCP and port 443, ensuring a seamless configuration process.

Caveats and limitations

While TCP-based monitoring offers many advantages, the initial release does have some limitations. Currently, it does not support capacity and voice measurements, dual-ended paths, or diagnostic tests. Additionally, teams must use Monitoring Points running version 16.1 or higher to take advantage of this new capability.

Conclusion

AppNeta’s introduction of TCP support marks a significant step forward in eliminating network blind spots. By addressing the limitations of ICMP, this enhancement provides deeper visibility and simplifies deployment. By leveraging this latest AppNeta release, network operations teams will now benefit from a more comprehensive, accurate, and streamlined monitoring experience.

To learn more, be sure to view our recent Small Bytes webinar, AppNeta's Updated TCP Monitoring Enhances Reliability and Accuracy. Also, be sure to visit our Small Bytes webinar series page to see a complete list of all upcoming events, and more than 50 on-demand sessions.