Three Multi-Cloud Scenarios That Benefit from Active Network Monitoring

Applications today are more portable and distributed than ever before. We’re witnessing businesses accelerate their migration to cloud-based infrastructure and software as a service (SaaS). Yet, amid this cloud adoption wave, a noticeable “cloud exit” trend is emerging as organizations seek an optimal balance between cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Leaders move toward hybrid and multi-cloud approaches to achieve greater flexibility, responsiveness, and reliability—critical drivers for accelerating innovation and boosting competitive advantage.

However, those benefits come with complexity. Workloads are increasingly distributed, traversing delivery paths that span an intricate web of environments, including public internet, private connections, Wi-Fi, SD-WAN, and non-terrestrial networks (NTN). With this diverse mix of technologies, ensuring consistent service level agreement (SLA) adherence becomes a significant challenge, particularly as end-to-end network communications extend beyond the enterprise network team's direct control.

This blog will explore real-world use cases in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, focusing on strategies to mitigate risk and enhance network observability. We’ll discuss best practices that help organizations navigate the complexities of modern application delivery and ensure reliable performance in three key scenarios: cloud-to-cloud, site-to-cloud, and cloud-to-SaaS.

1. Cloud-to-cloud

Analyst research shows that 98% of enterprises use or plan to use at least two cloud providers. These multi-cloud approaches have become essential to building resilient, flexible IT infrastructures. Organizations can utilize multi-cloud infrastructures to align cloud resources with specific business objectives, such as enhanced disaster recovery, improved regulatory compliance, and optimized cost management by dynamically scaling resources in the most economical cloud environments.

The image below illustrates how an application can leverage diverse cloud environments to enhance accessibility, ensure high availability, and minimize costs across regions.

Figure 1: Multi-cloud environment scenario.

In this scenario, active testing is essential for measuring performance across cloud providers, from layer 3 through layer 7. Active monitoring assesses and infers key network metrics, such as data loss, latency, round-trip time (RTT), and jitter. In addition, this can provide link capacity insights for a range of applications, including web, data, voice, and video. By leveraging these metrics, network operations teams can proactively detect and address performance degradation.

A best practice is to deploy monitoring points within each cloud provider—or take advantage of existing global monitoring points—to observe cross-cloud network performance from the end-user perspective. This approach enables precise analysis of several critical factors:

• Scope of an issue: Is the performance degradation a global issue, or is it localized to a specific cloud provider?
• Cross-cloud boundaries. Are there "invisibility pockets" at the boundaries between cloud providers that are affecting data flow?
• Traffic rerouting. Are inter-cloud reroutes causing increased latency or having a negative impact on application performance?

Figure 2: AppNeta helps to understand network performance across multi-cloud environments.

This monitoring approach helps maintain high application performance across multi-cloud deployments, allowing for rapid identification and resolution of cross-region and cross-cloud issues.

2. Site-to-cloud

Hybrid cloud scenarios are integral to the strategies of many organizations. The goal is to integrate on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, and public cloud resources into a cohesive IT environment. This model enables businesses to leverage the security and control of their private infrastructure, while benefiting from the scalability and flexibility of public clouds.

Key use cases for hybrid cloud include:

• Application modernization. Transitioning legacy applications to the cloud or modernizing them to harness cloud-native capabilities.
• Development and testing. Enabling on-demand deployment along with continuous integration, without the need to provision new infrastructure.
• Cost optimization. Reducing infrastructure costs by offloading unexpected and peak workloads to the cloud.
• Disaster recovery. Ensuring redundancy by replicating production data and applications in multiple environments.

A crucial challenge within hybrid cloud environments is achieving end-to-end performance visibility. As noted in a recent Microsoft blog post, traditional network performance monitoring tools often provide only a partial view, focusing on isolated segments of the network. Without a holistic view, it becomes difficult to fully understand the user experience or diagnose issues across the end-to-end infrastructure.

“We use AppNeta by Broadcom to bridge our cloud monitoring capabilities into our on-premises corporate network and capture the end-to-end network experience for our employees, whether connected from home, a customer’s office, or one of our Microsoft office locations worldwide. AppNeta allows us to observe the entire corporate network experience and integrate that monitoring data with observations from Azure Monitor for our cloud networking environment." --Microsoft Digital Team

Figure 3: Hybrid environment scenario.

In this scenario, the recommended practice is to deploy AppNeta monitoring points directly within user sites. This setup provides visibility into the network performance from the user's perspective, specifically targeting the hybrid applications they rely on. By monitoring at this level, organizations gain comprehensive insights across the entire application delivery path—from the cloud to on-premises infrastructure.

The example below demonstrates how AppNeta enables enhanced visibility of the availability and performance of business application components. With the solution, teams can track outages, SLA violations, and network degradation over time, establishing a reliable performance baseline. Such a baseline is invaluable for assessing the impact of any changes in the environment, as it allows teams to pinpoint variations in user experience and proactively address performance issues.

Figure 4: Site-to-cloud performance observability.

3. Cloud-to-SaaS

This scenario addresses the integration of business-critical applications with third-party SaaS solutions, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft 365. In a cloud-to-SaaS model, organizations leverage the flexibility and scalability of SaaS offerings, while retaining control over specific application components, data, or services within their own cloud infrastructure. Common use cases within this approach include:

• Hybrid architectures. Using SaaS tools like Google Workspace for collaborative functions, while core applications and data reside within a dedicated cloud environment, such as AWS or Azure.
• AI-as-a-service. Integrating cloud-hosted applications with SaaS-based AI services to enrich analysis.
• API integrations. Connecting cloud applications to SaaS platforms, enabling real-time data exchange and streamlined workflows across platforms.

By adopting a cloud-to-SaaS approach, organizations can benefit from the features of third-party SaaS platforms, while ensuring that critical components of their technology stack remain secure, controlled, and customized to meet business needs.

Figure 5: Cloud-to-SaaS environment scenario.

In this scenario, any performance degradation or latency introduced in reaching external services can have a significant impact on user experience and business operations. By monitoring the connectivity and responsiveness between the core application and its dependent SaaS services, teams can proactively identify and resolve issues affecting service quality.

The recommended approach is to deploy monitoring points within the cloud environment in which the core application is hosted. Organizations can detect and address bottlenecks or failures by continuously monitoring key performance metrics—such as latency, data loss, and API response times—between the core application’s cloud infrastructure and the third-party SaaS platform.

Figure 6: Visibility from global monitoring points to SaaS services.

Drawing it all together

Companies are increasingly adopting hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. However, this approach introduces complexity and strengthens the need for network visibility across diverse environments. To ensure consistent performance in scenarios like cloud-to-cloud, site-to-cloud, and cloud-to-SaaS, teams need to have advanced monitoring capabilities. AppNeta provides the necessary insights to diagnose issues and maintain optimized end-user experience across multiple cloud environments and third-party SaaS services. By establishing end-to-end visibility, network teams can safeguard service quality while driving strategic initiatives that maximize the benefits of hybrid, multi-cloud, and SaaS deployments. In the process, these teams can create a future-ready infrastructure that scales with the demands of the modern enterprise.

Figure 7: End-to-end observability across modern networks

Discover more about AppNeta by exploring our dedicated Network Observability microsite. Dive into in-depth resources and expert insights to enhance hybrid cloud performance and visibility.