Establish End-to-End Visibility in VMware VeloCloud Environments

The (often unrealized) promise of SD-WAN

In recent years, the move to SD-WAN technologies like VeloCloud has been both rapid and widespread. While the use of SD-WAN has yielded benefits, one EMA report revealed that only 38% of respondents said their SD-WAN deployments were fully successful.

What’s the reason for these less-than-stellar outcomes? Challenges encountered can vary. In some cases, teams can embark on an SD-WAN initiative without an effective plan or lacking a clear understanding of this technology. However, another overarching challenge for many teams is introduced by the dynamic nature of SD-WAN. For example, SD-WAN technologies will automatically move traffic around to ensure that performance isn’t affected by transient events. While this can help with performance, it also introduces a lot of complexity and change, not to mention alert volumes, to the environments teams are managing. Further, while this automatic rerouting can help, it remains vital for administrators to understand when these events occur so they can ensure that seemingly minor issues don’t go unaddressed—and grow into something larger that ultimately does affect the user experience.

Given all this, gaining comprehensive visibility remains vital, but keeps getting increasingly difficult. Solutions like VeloCloud provide useful high-level overlay insights, but they don’t offer visibility into the underlay. This fractured visibility is very common. In fact, the same EMA report revealed that 42% of respondents said they lack end-to-end insights across both the SD-WAN overlay and underlay.

This means administrators need to stitch together visibility across their SD-WAN solution and other point monitoring tools. While this is problematic in its own right, the nature of today’s networks tends to exacerbate these challenges. Today, network delivery paths are highly reliant upon the internet as the primary WAN, as well as a diverse range of third-party networks and cloud providers—and these external environments introduce additional visibility gaps and challenges.  

AppNeta by Broadcom delivers the solution

AppNeta by Broadcom enables teams to address the imperatives of modern networks, including those featuring SD-WAN solutions like VeloCloud. AppNeta can validate the end-to-end quality of the overlay that’s managed by VeloCloud, and verify the performance of other links that exist outside of VeloCloud, such as those traversing SASE solutions and the networks of ISPs and cloud providers.

The platform enables teams to address these key objectives:

Validate overlay quality

Teams can verify that end-to-end network paths are addressing business requirements. With the platform, teams can correlate underlay performance to an overlay network. In a single window, users can view both the underlay routes and the overlay, including traffic entering and exiting a tunnel.

With AppNeta, teams can gain comprehensive visibility into overlay performance metrics, including capacity, latency, and round-trip time. The solution can also track voice performance, such as jitter and mean opinion score (MOS). These metrics are among the most critical measures of performance; issues with voice tend to be the first thing users notice when problems arise.

Diagnose underlay issues

The reality is that the performance of any SD-WAN technology is ultimately only as good as the underlay. With AppNeta, teams can gain comprehensive visibility into all the elements and services that make up the underlay, including those environments managed by third parties. With AppNeta, teams can gauge the performance of ISPs based on service levels and capacity actually delivered. Teams can quickly identify the location of network performance issues, including in externally hosted network domains.

Verify cloud connections and app performance

AppNeta enables teams to track the performance of cloud services and apps, validating SLA compliance. Administrators can track the experience of users interacting with cloud apps. Both network and app teams can view app response times, and gain a unified view to determine whether it is a network or app issue affecting users.

Administrators can drill into views to get details on an app and understand why it may be slow or unresponsive. AppNeta enables teams to identify which page is slow, where content elements are coming from, and which elements are taking longest to load. They can even see a screen shot of an error that an active test encounters, helping teams immediately diagnose the cause of an issue.

AppNeta: Key advantages

Here are some of the key advantages AppNeta delivers:

• Cross-domain visibility. Teams can gain hop-by-hop views of every domain in a user’s connectivity path. Administrators can quickly identify where issues are arising, no matter which domain is experiencing the issue.
• Flexible, resource-efficient implementation. AppNeta does continuous active monitoring in a low-overhead manner, minimizing the resources consumed. The solution can also monitor environments, without having to deploy the solution in those domains. As a result, teams can monitor a range of external apps and services, including Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, and Google Workplace.
• ISP identification and SLA monitoring. In many scenarios, such as a retail environment with hundreds of branch locations, a central network team may not be certain about which ISPs are serving each branch’s connectivity needs. AppNeta can monitor paths from the branch and automatically detect the ISP supporting a connection. Plus, the solution can then put an SLA in place and measure against that SLA for reporting and vendor management.
• Effective baselines. With its continuous, active monitoring, AppNeta helps teams establish effective baselines of normal performance. These baselines are critical in enabling teams to establish effective thresholds, alerting processes, and more. In addition, these baselines provide critical insights when teams are undertaking transformations, such as implementing a new SD-WAN product or moving from MPLS to a broadband network. With AppNeta, teams can establish effective baselines, and gauge them before, during, and after migration to ensure user experiences aren’t affected.

The benefits of AppNeta

By employing AppNeta, teams can realize a range of significant benefits:

Gain granular visibility to speed triage and remediation workflows

AppNeta delivers all the data network operations teams need. Teams can dive deeper, for example, into packet loss on WAN links. They can see what the entire path looks like, from where the user is located to the destination they’re trying to reach. They can quickly identify the error domain, across any environments, whether issues are arising in the underlay, overlay, last-mile ISP networks, or in transit to upstream cloud or SaaS environments. This comprehensive visibility enables teams to realize significant reductions in mean-time-to-repair metrics.

Speed mean time to innocence

When issues arise in external environments, internal teams can quickly identify that their internal systems aren’t the culprit, saving staff time. They can prove the issue is not in their environment and provide evidence as to where in the service provider’s network there’s an issue. In addition, they can more effectively hold external service providers accountable for issues and SLA breaches.

Boost team productivity

AppNeta equips level-one and level-two operators with insights to address more issues, without escalating to senior team members. This speeds response, and it helps maximize the productivity of existing teams.

Conclusion

While SD-WAN technologies like VeloCloud can offer a lot of benefits, they also introduce a lot of moving parts. To intelligently manage network performance and user experience, network operations teams need comprehensive, end-to-end views, with correlated visibility into both the SD-WAN overlay and the underlay those connections rely upon.

To learn more, see our Small Bytes webcast, Three Ways AppNeta Enables End-to-End Visibility for VMware VeloCloud. This session offers a fast, compelling look at the challenges posed by SD-WAN monitoring. Plus, it details how AppNeta can help, providing a demonstration of the solution in action.