Gaining End-to-End Network Observability in a Multi-Cloud World

In a relatively short period of time, networks have grown much bigger, much more complex, and much more critical to the ongoing operation of the business. Quite simply, while ensuring optimized network services has never been more critical, it’s also never been more difficult.

In many large enterprises, network operations teams are seeing tens of thousands of endpoints added to already complex internal environments. At the same time, networks keep getting more opaque as delivery paths continue to rely upon an increasingly dynamic mix of internal environments, cloud providers, ISP networks, and other third-party environments.

Many teams are relying upon point tools, gaining only limited visibility into disparate portions of the end-to-end network that supports a given service. For example, some tools provide visibility into on-premises equipment, others offer coverage of the SD-WAN overlay, and others monitor a specific cloud provider’s environments. The problem is that a given network path may traverse all those domains and more. Further, these multi-domain environments are increasingly dynamic, with many moving parts, virtualized resources, constantly shifting paths, and so on.

Contending with piecemeal, isolated visibility, teams confront a range of problems:

• Network operations teams have to do manual, labor-intensive efforts, inspecting different tools and collecting and correlating different data sets.
• Teams are plagued with time consuming, slow, and suboptimal root cause analysis and remediation.
• The end result is that issues are detected late, they last too long, and the business is exposed to the steep costs and other penalties of recurring downtime.

Solution introduction: AppNeta

AppNeta by Broadcom delivers true end-to-end network observability across modern environments, eliminating visibility gaps introduced by the reliance on distributed, multi-vendor, multi-cloud networks. With AppNeta, teams can actively monitor network delivery experience, whether connections rely on cloud networks, ISPs, SD-WAN technologies, or any mix of the above. Here’s an introduction to some of the solution’s key capabilities.

Monitoring policies

With AppNeta, administrators can employ monitoring policies to streamline monitoring set up in dynamic, large-scale environments. The solution significantly reduces monitoring and management overhead. Here’s an example of how the solution can help:

A network operations team is responsible for supporting monitoring requirements of a large user base that is located in an array of countries and continents. New endpoints and users are constantly being added, and many existing devices often need to be updated and removed.

Using AppNeta, administrators set up policies based on specific endpoint and user types. They can set up these policies once, and ensure they’re applied consistently and automatically. In this way, they can establish comprehensive monitoring coverage, without having to set up, configure, or modify policies on a per-device basis.

Network and web app coverage

AppNeta offers these two key forms of coverage:

• Network monitoring. AppNeta features a delivery component that provides capabilities for synthetic network monitoring. Administrators can centrally define the network paths to target.
• Web app monitoring. The solution’s experience component offers web app monitoring capabilities. These capabilities enable unified monitoring policy definition.

This network and web app coverage is driven by monitoring point tags that span the environment. These tags enable operators to apply business context to monitoring points, enabling improved filtering, dashboards, and reports. With these capabilities, teams can precisely target app monitoring, including by location and by users.

How it works

Here’s an introduction to working with monitoring policies in the AppNeta solution.

Interface

Once in the AppNeta interface, operators can look at different components and monitoring policies, and see, for example, whether a given policy is enabled or disabled. Operators can customize their views, including hiding or showing columns and applying filters. For example, if an administrator is only interested in monitoring cloud environments, such as Google Cloud and Azure, they can apply a filter so only policies relevant to those environments are displayed. From the interface, operators can drill down to see policies for an app within that specific environment, such as policies that apply to BigQuery within the Google environment.

Editing, creating policies

Teams can easily create or edit policies. To create a policy, teams start by assigning a name and target.

Flexible configuration options

AppNeta offers maximum flexibility in configuration. For example, if a team has an app that relies on BigQuery, they can target the app from different places. This is true whether the app is running on-premises, in the public cloud, or in a private cloud. Monitoring can be applied in a number of ways:

• Manual. Operators can manually specify a group of monitoring points that need to target an app.
• Monitoring point type. Teams can add a new rule to target based on monitoring point types. For example, they can set up a policy for monitoring all endpoints assigned to the category of “containers.”
• Regions. Teams can add a rule for a specific region or data center. For instance, a team could create policies in which all US-based monitoring points will target the BigQuery app, while those outside of the US will target Amazon Redshift.

Administrators can write alerting rules on top of these policies. For example, an operator can assign all alerts generated through a given policy to have timing details reflected in the East Coast time zone within the US.

Viewing paths

Once these monitoring policies are employed and data starts to be captured, teams can then use monitoring coverage to view the end-to-end network path. This enables fast identification of the error domain when issues arise. Operators can view paths that span a range of domains, including internal data centers, last-mile ISP networks, and application service provider environments.

With AppNeta, teams can see the number of hops involved and analyze what happened to traffic. Teams can then gather information that can help speed troubleshooting. For example, if an issue arises in an ISP’s network, administrators can provide concrete details on the nature of the issue, including its duration, severity, device type, and more.

Conclusion

For today’s network operations teams, it is vital to move away from the piecemeal visibility offered by point tools. That’s why so many groups are now moving to AppNeta. With the solution, operators can gain end-to-end visibility across today’s dynamic network paths, including those that span internal networks and a mix of third-party environments, including multiple cloud provider networks. To learn more, be sure to view our Small Bytes webcast, How to measure network experience in multi-cloud environments.