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Key Takeaways
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There’s no doubt that managing networks today is a whole different ballgame than it used to be. Complexity is growing, environments are more fragmented, and user expectations have never been higher.
One of the biggest challenges for network operations teams? Visibility—or the lack of it.
Network operations used to be much simpler. Traffic flowed through your own data center, and you had the visibility and control needed to manage performance and troubleshoot issues. However, those days are long gone.
Now, application traffic might start in a branch office or someone’s home office, travel through a local ISP, cross a few carrier backbones, and land in a remote data center or cloud environment somewhere across the globe. Issues can crop up anywhere along the way—or in multiple spots at once—and most of that path is completely out of your control.
If you’re struggling with visibility gaps, you’re not alone. A recent report found that 80% of teams are struggling with blind spots. And when an issue pops up, say, in the last-mile ISP network, your end users suffer—but you may have zero visibility into the nature of the problem, where it is located, and so on.
To troubleshoot effectively, you need full visibility. You must be able to see the traffic, understand what’s happening from the user’s perspective, and spot problems wherever they occur. That’s why 93% of network teams now say synthetic monitoring is essential. In addition, 96% say network observability isn’t a luxury—it’s a requirement.
You need tools that shine a light on those dark corners. Tools that connect performance metrics directly to the user experience. You need end-to-end observability.
With Network Observability by Broadcom, network operations teams can establish the visibility they need to track and optimize the performance of their modern networks.
The solution features these products:
With the release of DX NetOps Active Experience, Broadcom has made it even easier for customers to eliminate their visibility gaps and gain true end-to-end visibility. Active Experience lets you turn your existing DX NetOps SNMP data collectors into AppNeta Monitoring Points. If you’re already running DX NetOps version 24.3.9 and have AppNeta entitlements, you can start using Active Experience today. That means you can start doing active testing—without deploying extra hardware or agents. (Check out the Active Experience solution brief for more information.)
With Active Experience, you can gain the following advantages:
Active Experience is an integral part of Broadcom’s holistic observability strategy; we’re seeking to provide complete visibility across the network landscape. DX NetOps offers central intelligence, taking in diverse types of network data to provide comprehensive visibility. In addition to user experience data available through Active Experience and AppNeta, the solution can collect alarms and faults, performance and flow data, topology information, configuration data, and logs. It can also incorporate intelligence from software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN), software-defined data centers (SDDC), and Wi-Fi networks.
With this unified intelligence, your network teams gain comprehensive visibility, enabling them to quickly identify root causes and resolve network issues that affect vital business services and infrastructure.
With AppNeta Monitoring Points, teams can do active network monitoring, gaining critical, real-time insights into the real-world performance of WAN and cloud connectivity, web application experiences, and SaaS applications. With Active Experience, you can set up active tests to understand performance from your branch offices to critical cloud applications, between data centers, or from user locations to specific SaaS services. You can obtain facts and figures about how connections are performing—so you don’t have to rely on guesswork.
Active Experience simplifies how you extend your visibility. With Active Experience, DX NetOps customers can immediately leverage these capabilities—using infrastructure they’ve already deployed. Teams can set up active monitoring capabilities in locations where collectors are already deployed, providing immediate insights without taking on the time and effort required to do hardware setup or agent installs.
AppNeta provides simple policies that can be used to automate monitoring, streamlining operations and promoting consistency across domains and locations.
Where does Active Experience shine? Here are three common scenarios:
One of the main strengths of Active Experience is how easy it is to deploy. If you're running DX NetOps and have AppNeta entitlements, you can quickly turn your existing infrastructure into powerful AppNeta Monitoring Points—without installing new hardware or agents. Here's exactly how to do it.
To begin, log into your DX NetOps instance.
Note: If you're managing multiple organizations, ensure that you’ve assigned the monitoring point to the correct organization at this stage. This will help streamline latter steps.
Next, switch over to your AppNeta instance and follow these steps:
With your monitoring point now configured, the service will automatically start on the collector. It will also begin communicating with the AppNeta SaaS infrastructure.
To ensure everything is working, go to the AppNeta UI and navigate to the organization you associated with the new monitoring point. You can then check the point’s status indicators:
If both look good, you’re ready to roll.
Once the monitoring point is enabled, it immediately begins doing active testing across designated connectivity paths. These tests reflect real-world user journeys, helping you measure performance of connections between data centers, cloud services, SaaS platforms, and more.
With Active Experience, scaling coverage is just as easy as the initial setup. As you deploy new SNMP data collectors, you can automatically activate them as monitoring points using your defined policies. If you’re operating with a single DX NetOps tenant, configurations are inherited across all collectors within the same IP domain. No need to reconfigure from scratch.
If you want to connect multiple data collectors to the same AppNeta organization, that’s easy. You don’t even need to log in to AppNeta again—just enable them directly from DX NetOps. Need to change a monitoring point’s configuration? No problem. Log in, select the organization, update as needed, and save. This flexibility makes Active Experience not just powerful—but incredibly user-friendly, even in large-scale environments.
Your network operations teams can’t continue working around visibility gaps anymore—not when every second of downtime or degraded performance has a negative impact on your users and your business. With Network Observability by Broadcom, and the new Active Experience offering, you can quickly and simply eliminate visibility gaps and stay in control of the entire network landscape.
With the solution’s streamlined process, your team can establish active testing—using the infrastructure you already have in place. Want to know more and see Active Experience in action? Be sure to review the Small Bytes webcast, Broadcom Launches DX NetOps Active Experience.
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.