Announcing DX NetOps Active Experience

There is one scene in the 2003 blockbuster film “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” that never fails to fill me with awe. As the forces of the Dark Lord Sauron move towards their bloody siege of the Gondor capital, Minas Tirith, the hobbit Pippin lights the beacon fire. As the fire grows to a roar, the great wizard, Gandalf the White, simply whispers, “Hope is kindled.”

We then see 60 seconds of picturesque landscapes as each of the unfolding outposts spots a small glow deep on the horizon. Each beacon is lit in turn, and the signal eventually reaches Edoras, the capital city of Rohan 300 miles away. The fiery plea is spotted by the hero Aragon as he excitedly exclaims, “The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for aid.”

You’ll have to watch the movie if you don’t know what happens next, but the key point is that being able to signal over such a long distance allowed the armies of Middle Earth to communicate and join forces to defeat Sauron.  

This got me thinking, what if one of those beacons didn’t get lit, maybe because a sentinel’s view was obscured by fog or because they fell asleep? The signal never reaches Aragon and Sauron lays waste to Minas Tirith, and proceeds on his way to pursue the total destruction of Middle Earth. Perhaps Gandalf could have found another way to communicate if he knew a beacon did not get lit, but would the message have made it in time? Gandalf needed visibility from start to finish, end-to-end, as a failsafe. It all turned out okay, but so many things could have gone wrong.

As it turns out, in the networks we rely on, we basically are doing the same thing. We send our signal and hope it reaches its destination. Much like the beacon towers, we are relying on a system of connectivity in which there are a lot of chances for problems to occur. We trust (and hope) that our communications are quick and reliable, but if there’s a problem, it’s hard to know which beacon isn’t lit without a full view of all of the hops along the way.

The DX NetOps team at Broadcom believes in this need for end-to-end visibility across all of the networks you rely on to communicate with services and applications. And now we are making it easier and more cost-effective than ever to leverage the power of AppNeta active network and experience monitoring with DX NetOps.

We are excited to announce that, beginning in version 24.3.8, DX NetOps customers with existing AppNeta entitlements will be able to leverage the DX NetOps SNMP Data Collectors they’ve already deployed, and use them as AppNeta Monitoring Points. You gain instant monitoring from the infrastructure you already deployed—at no additional cost!

Each Monitoring Point enables active test observability to critical endpoints, such as cloud (public, private, multi), data center, application, SaaS, and so on, from your existing locations. In addition, we are providing three free licenses (AppNeta Universal Licenses) with up to 15 active tests each (totaling 45 free tests). This enables you to see the power of AppNeta and DX NetOps Active Experience quickly and easily.

Using DX NetOps Portal, Monitoring Points can be enabled on eligible Data Collectors and connected to your AppNeta organizations in minutes; all you need is your AppNeta login!  You can easily configure proxy and SSL connectivity right in the DX NetOps Portal.

Once enabled (left image above), the power of AppNeta active testing provides simple Monitoring Policies to automate and ensure monitoring consistency across all of your locations (right image above). Deploy more tests and Monitoring Points to expand your coverage for full end-to-end visibility.

If only Gandalf had DX NetOps Active Experience. Luckily, it wasn’t necessary, but that’s not a chance we should be taking with mission-critical communications. Especially since it’s never been easier.

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements related to DX NetOps Active Experience as we continue to make the AppNeta active testing technology easier to use and more valuable for Network Observability by Broadcom customers.