Broadcom Software Academy Blog

DX NetOps Network Monitoring Software Improves Security for SDx

Written by Sarbdeep Singh | Apr 7, 2021 6:00:00 AM

Broadcom enhanced its analytic capabilities in the latest release of the DX NetOps network monitoring software that now enables network operations teams to reliably deliver application experiences over SD-WAN technologies built on Silver Peak (HPE), VMware VeloCloud, Cisco Meraki, Nokia Nuage, and 128 Technology (Juniper).

DX NetOps network monitoring software improves your time to value through advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities and delivers complete unified network visibility by enabling full-stack analytics for traditional and modern architectures. DX NetOps captures and converts inventory, topology, device metrics, faults, flow, and packet analysis into actionable intelligence for network operations teams. Complimented by our AIOps solution, DX NetOps, enables IT teams to establish proactive, autonomous remediation capabilities across the applications, infrastructure, and networks to fuel superior user experiences.

DX NetOps provides modern network monitoring support for software-defined architectures (SDN/SD-WAN) and hybrid cloud platforms by collecting data from SDN and NFV controllers and orchestrators and then correlating logical network entities with physical resources. DX NetOps normalizes the collected data and sends updates to subscribers that consume the data. Most of the SD-WAN vendors out today support both on-prem and cloud controllers to monitor SD-WAN sites. To monitor them, DX NetOps needs direct access to these controllers and orchestrators.

Over the past 12 months, highly influenced by the pandemic, operations teams now prefer to have controllers or orchestrators hosted in the cloud and to manage their SD-WAN sites from a global perspective. With additional security in mind, they prefer to have a proxy server or security server between the vendor monitoring solution and orchestrator or controller. That vendor solution then monitors transactions over the network.

This scenario helps define additional policies and sends only the data from their software-defined deployments to the network monitoring software while adhering to data compliance policies. To cater to this requirement, DX NetOps has been enhanced to support proxy servers which act as intermediaries between DX NetOps and SDN orchestrators and helps provide control over the content that DX NetOps collects.

  Figure 1: The DX NetOps architecture depicts support for proxy servers to improve the security of SDx deployments.
 

Overall DX NetOps network monitoring software has been enhanced for the most common cloud-based controllers like Meraki, Cisco ACI, Versa, VeloCloud, and Viptela via http/https and Socks proxy protocols. The following parameters have been added for proxy support:

USE_PROXY

  • The flag that specifies to use proxy
  • Allowed values: true, false

PROXY_IP

  • It should be a valid proxy server IP

PROXY_PORT

  • The port number to which the proxy server configured

PROXY_PROTOCOL

  • Represents the proxy type
  • Allowed values: http, https, and socks

PROXY_USERNAME

  • The username of the proxy protocol

PROXY_PASSWORD

  • The password of the proxy protocol 

With the rise of modern architectures required to support digital business initiatives, it is imperative that enterprises have comprehensive and secure network monitoring software visibility coupled with AI and machine learning capabilities to truly understand application behavior and optimize their SD-WAN investments.

 

To learn more about network monitoring from Broadcom, visit our Enterprise Software Academy.