In today’s dynamic, complex network environments, there’s a big difference between having monitoring data and having intelligence. To troubleshoot issues quickly, it’s vital to have timely, intuitive visibility into the metrics that matter.
With the combination of AppNeta and DX NetOps, teams can gain the insights they need to efficiently and intelligently manage their environments. Here’s a brief introduction to each solution:
- DX NetOps. DX NetOps offers scalable operations monitoring capabilities that span traditional and modern architectures. The solution converts inventory, topology, device metrics, faults, flow, and packet analysis into actionable intelligence.
- AppNeta. AppNeta delivers active, continuous monitoring. AppNeta gives teams end-to-end visibility of network delivery paths, even those that span third-party ISP and cloud networks and hybrid work environments. AppNeta features TruPath, which is a patented, low-overhead technology that enables teams to establish monitoring visibility from the user perspective.
AppNeta data can be fed into DX NetOps, where teams can leverage sophisticated aggregation, reporting, and dashboard capabilities.
Key capabilities
Here are a few key capabilities the solutions provide:
- Extensive flexibility. At Broadcom, our product team’s goal is to provide smart default dashboards and reports, but also to give customers all the knobs and levers they need to tailor views to their specific environments, personnel, objectives, and goals. Teams can establish dynamic and custom dashboards for a range of personas and roles in the organization.
- Support for reactive and proactive operations. These solutions offer advanced capabilities for event- and alarm-driven response. They also offer flexible, customizable dashboards that fuel intelligent, performance-driven investigations, triage, and workflows.
- Actionable intelligence. Dashboards are actionable, providing one-click access to drill down and get more details, whether on specific metrics, monitored devices, or paths.
- On-demand reports. With these solutions, teams can generate reports on demand, or schedule reports to be generated and disseminated, whether on a daily, weekly, monthly, or custom interval.
How it works
DX NetOps features a simple interface for building dashboards. In the examples below, we will feature data from the AppNeta integration, with a focus on metrics like packet loss and latency, but the principles can be applied for all metrics being fed into DX NetOps.
Starting in “my dashboards,” users can start with existing dashboards and edit them, or copy them and create new variants. (In the future, we will be rolling out a new feature that enables users to copy dashboards and paste them into other folders, for example, so they can be shared with other users.) Users can also start from scratch and build a new dashboard.
Either way, you name the new view that you’ll be creating. Next, you define or edit the aspects of the view, including these attributes:
- Layouts. DX NetOps features a drag-and-drop interface for selecting views and dragging elements into various pre-defined layouts. You can customize the numbers of columns and rows.
- Metrics. You can modify which source metrics are featured and ways data is aggregated. Metrics from AppNeta can be found in the SDN path category, which is collected via the VNA tool. You can leverage a range of metrics, including inbound data packet loss percentage and outbound data packet loss percentage.
- Thresholds and baselines. You can establish thresholds to enable easy comparisons and alerting. For example, a threshold can be defined so that, if a packet loss metric exceeds a value of two, a critical alarm will be generated. Baseline values can be included, enabling easy comparisons with metrics captured.
- Time window. Users can also modify the time range displayed, including standard windows like one week or prior month, and custom intervals.
Following is more information about the specific types of views available.
Card view
Card views offer users a high-level view of environments. Cards can summarize by count, and depict the number of elements in various states, such as good/green, degraded/orange, critical/red, and so on.
Users can click on these top-level numbers to get details for a specific group. You can group elements, for example, to see totals for a top-level group, and underlying child groups. Card views can provide summaries of groups and display averages. It is also possible to view max counts and max averages, which is helpful in distinguishing between an aberration and a case in which thresholds are consistently being exceeded.
Bar charts
Bar charts offer helpful views, enabling users to see, for example, the top 10 paths with the highest latency. This makes it easy for users to quickly identify where some of the most pressing problems exist.
Administrators can select stacked and side-by-side charts. For stacked charts, for example, a view could show packet loss, both inbound and outbound, for specific paths, in a single bar. You can also compare current results with baselines and averages for the same time period. It is also easy to change the sort order, defining which elements appear first in the chart.
Trend charts
Trend charts feature two metrics, which each sharing a common 0 axis. These charts are useful for tracking prior trends and projecting future metrics. You can choose to hide or show a goal line as well.
Users can drill into a specific area. For example, a user may want to view paths for a specific region. They can enter “Las Vegas” in the search box to see all paths for that region. This can be a useful starting point for initial inspection and troubleshooting.
AppNeta provides hop-by-hop path visibility, and users can drill into each point, so they can spot the location of problems and determine where to focus further investigation in AppNeta.
Conclusion
With DX NetOps and AppNeta, teams can gain the intelligence needed to effectively track and manage the performance of today’s modern networks. To learn more, be sure to watch our Small Bytes session on how to create custom network delivery experience dashboards for your NOC. This session offers a detailed look at all the powerful ways DX NetOps can help users leverage AppNeta data and gain highly intuitive, actionable insights.