Bring a Business Service Perspective to Your Network Monitoring

In recent years, network performance and business performance have become increasingly intertwined. Now, virtually every critical employee and customer service is in some way reliant upon network connectivity. When connectivity falters, those critical processes can be impaired or stopped completely.

However, for too many teams, it can be difficult to knowledgeably determine how specific outages or issues actually affect a business service. For example, say an operator discovers a device is down. Can they tell if it’s really a problem? Are services and users unaffected, or is it a serious outage and major business services have ground to a halt?

The solution

Network Observability by Broadcom equips operators with a unified, end-to-end view of traditional networks as well as modern Wi-Fi, software-defined, and multi-cloud environments. The solution provides the intelligence and capabilities teams need to be able to track, manage, and optimize how the network is performing—and how effectively it is supporting the business. With the solution, teams can establish monitoring dashboards and alerts that enable more proactive management of business services and SLAs.

The solution features these offerings:

• DX NetOps by Broadcom. DX NetOps provides comprehensive, end-to-end network visibility, including across traditional, software-defined, and cloud architectures.
• AppNeta by Broadcom. With AppNeta, teams can establish active monitoring of network delivery paths, including those traversing cloud, SaaS, and other external sites. AppNeta enables network operations teams to fully understand how performance and user experience are affected by common issues like application outages, route changes, connectivity drops, and ISP peering changes.

With these integrated solutions, teams can bring together fault, performance, flow, and user experience into DX NetOps Portal. Operators can view active monitoring data in the portal, just as they view other metric types.

Through AppNeta, users can incorporate network paths into services. This is indispensable for monitoring network paths associated with cloud services and SaaS offerings, such as Office 365. With AppNeta, users can gain real-time and historical insights into the status of components that combine to deliver a service.

Process: How to get started

To start, administrators go in the service editor within the DX NetOps user interface, where they can define a new service or modify an existing one. Services are defined by grouping all the components that a service relies upon, including devices, interfaces (whether physical or virtual), processes running on a server, and so on.

In addition, users can also leverage the solution’s Global Collections capability, which enables the assignment of specific network components, such as devices, interfaces, and paths to services. Once assigned, membership in a group is maintained automatically, for example, reflecting when elements are taken down, deployed, replaced, and so on. (To learn more, be sure to see my prior post, Optimize Network Asset Organization with Global Collections in DX NetOps.) Next, users define network and web paths.

Administrators define service policies and SLAs or use existing ones. These can be based on a range of criteria:

• Availability, such as percentage
• Response time
• Mean-time-to-response metrics

Users can align policies with SLA parameters, such as business hours, timeframes, and so on. In addition, teams can use filter functionality to exclude different types of alarms based on such conditions as alarm severity, whether a service is in maintenance mode, and more.

Administrators define service criticality, that is, whether a service is low, medium, or high priority. Teams can also define the nature of outages and their severity. To illustrate, if a data center loses a single backbone WAN link, it may not constitute an issue. If configured properly, users may only see a negligible dip in performance, if they experience an issue at all. However, if all links fail or if an entire firewall pair fails, it could result in a complete outage. In this scenario, the failure of a single WAN link may trigger a minor alarm, while a failure of a firewall pair would generate a major alarm.

Once services are defined, they will be available for use in a range of DX NetOps dashboards and reports. Users can complete the following tasks:

• Define components or groups.
• Choose pre-packaged alarms or establish new ones.
• Create SLA templates to help streamline ongoing operations and facilitate automation.

Alerting and reporting

The solution provides an array of alerting and reporting capabilities. Teams can establish alarms and reports based on service impact, SLA violations, and service degradation. Users can have reports scheduled and emailed automatically. The solution enables teams to access these capabilities:

• View projections and SLA trends. Teams can gain the insights needed to preempt issues. With the solution, users can receive alerts, not just after an SLA has been breached, but indicating that, unless changes are made immediately, a service will be affected, or an SLA will be violated.
• Leverage customer-level insights. Administrators can associate defined services with specific customers. This way, if a specific service goes down, administrators can readily identify which customers will be affected, helping guide remediation and prioritization. With the solution’s high-level views, teams can see the specific services various customers are using, and how those services are performing. For a particular site, they can see what guarantees have been established and view compliance status.
• Access historical and real time views. Operators can view current status and track metrics across various time intervals, such as day, week, or month.

Conclusion

Today, network performance can have a significant role to play in business performance. As networks keep getting more critical, network operations teams can’t afford to rely on guesswork. These teams need timely, actionable intelligence, not only on network device response and up time, but on how critical business services are faring.

With its comprehensive coverage, advanced analytics, and business service intelligence, Network Observability by Broadcom enables teams to manage operations with a clear picture of how and whether network issues affect critical business services.
To learn more, and see a demo of the solution in action, be sure to watch our Small Bytes session, How To Understand the Business Impact of Network Performance. Our Small Bytes series offers practical examples on getting the most from Broadcom solution investments. Visit our Small Bytes page to see a complete list of upcoming and on-demand presentations in the series. Finally, you can also take the course, DX NetOps: Integrate AppNeta 200, to get more details.