Right Data, Right Now: Why Timely, Actionable Network Observability is Essential

For teams in many organizations, the work of IT and network management keeps getting more difficult. A recent EMA survey offers some findings that clearly illustrate this point. When respondents were asked which networking skills are the most difficult to find, several roles received a response of 30% or more, including network security, network monitoring and troubleshooting, and data center networking.

As network environments keep getting more complex and fast-changing, these jobs only keep getting more difficult to do—and these positions keep getting harder to fill. These trends show no signs of abating, with network delivery paths spanning an increasingly diverse, interrelated mix of cloud providers, ISPs, SD-WAN technologies, and more.

Requirements: The need for network observability

As teams seek to ensure optimized network performance and service levels, while navigating all this complexity, optimized network observability solutions become an increasingly urgent requirement. Now more than ever, teams need solutions that make it practical to collect, clean, normalize, and present all the data that’s required. They require solutions that make it intuitive and fast to get targeted, actionable insights.

Solution: Gain true network observability with Broadcom

Network Observability by Broadcom enables teams to establish unified, complete visibility across their modern network environments. With the solution, teams can have one place to go to get all the data they need and gain actionable insights. The solution provides comprehensive, contextualized data from diverse sources, including from domains managed by third parties, such as ISPs and cloud providers. Network Observability by Broadcom offers these advantages:

• Leverage data from the systems you already have in place.
• Gain visibility to enrich alarms, promoting faster, more efficient remediation.
• Solve problems more quickly, so teams can spend more time focusing on strategic efforts.

Use case examples

With Network Observability by Broadcom, administrators can, in just a few clicks, gain contextual intelligence, drill down to get details, and get their questions answered. This fuels faster response when issues arise and enables more proactive management. The following sections examine two potential examples of how the solution boosts operational speed and efficacy.

Reactive: Get instant insights when incidents arise

In this scenario, an administrator receives an alarm indicating a remote site lost connectivity. Upon entering the alarm console, the administrator can see alerts and faults across their environment. With the solution, this includes visibility into traditional networks and SD-WAN, as well as user experience metrics drawn from AppNeta by Broadcom.

Within the console, they can view quality alarms that reveal BGP peer session issues were happening around the same time as the connectivity issue. Through the console, the administrator can also view the topology to see the interdependencies and downstream impact of these issues.

Through the platform’s active testing, users can track such metrics as response time and latency. From these views, the administrator can drill into specific elements and see errors, performance metrics, utilization, discards, and more.

For example, in this case, the administrator sees that utilization dropped considerably. They can check to see if anything changed in the affected router’s configuration to see if an erroneous change was the cause.

The administrator then sees that, immediately before the issues arose, three lines of code were changed in the router’s configuration. Finally, based on this finding, they can open a ticket to have the configuration error resolved by the appropriate technician.

This scenario illustrates the power of Network Observability by Broadcom. With the solution, administrators can quickly, and with just a few mouse clicks, determine where the issue arose and what caused it. Plus, the solution can provide specific details to relevant team members to speed resolution.

Proactive: Gain insights to spot issues in a third-party provider’s network

With AppNeta, teams can gain end-user monitoring insights, so they can effectively assess performance and spot troublesome trends and take steps to minimize the impact on end users. This solution provides hop-by-hop visibility across the user’s connectivity path.

In this scenario, an administrator can assess user experience data and see that users at their organization’s Seattle location are experiencing an inordinate amount of change events. They can see how these changes are affecting network delivery.

The administrator recognizes there’s a lot of data loss occurring in connections originating in the Seattle location. Using the solution’s API integrations, the administrator can also view metrics drawn from SD-WAN controllers. In this way, they can see their SD-WAN connections broken out, which are supported by two different ISPs. (For illustration purposes, we’ll refer to them as ISP 1 and ISP 2.)

Through this view, the administrator can then see that it is only connections going through ISP 1 that are experiencing issues, while those transiting the network of ISP 2 are performing normally. Specifically, connections going through ISP 1 are experiencing significant packet loss. In this way, the administrator can quickly see that the issue was tied to the network of ISP 1.

In this way, Network Observability by Broadcom speeds mean time to innocence (MTTI), meaning teams don’t have to spend a lot of time investigating whether there are issues within their internal network. In addition, they can help users employ a workaround (potentially routing traffic through ISP 2 until the issue is resolved by ISP 1, for example).

Finally, they have concrete data to notify ISP 1 of the issue, including the nature of the problem, where in their network the issue arose, and so on.

Conclusion

Today’s network operations teams need all the help they can get. Networks continue to grow more dynamic and complex, relying on diverse technologies, vendors, and service providers. Teams simply can’t continue to rely on disjointed, siloed tool sets and manage these environments effectively. Now, teams need unified solutions that deliver true network observability.

Network Observability by Broadcom gives these teams one place to go to get all the data they need.  The solution provides comprehensive, contextualized data from diverse sources, including from domains managed by ISPs, cloud providers, and other third parties. To learn more, see our Small Bytes webcast, Collecting the Right Data Enables One-Click Network Diagnosis. This engaging session offers a demonstration of the solution, and how it enables administrators to rapidly identify and troubleshoot issues.