How DX NetOps Fuels Rapid, Accurate Isolation in Modern Networks

Businesses, like pretty much all of us, continue to grow ever more reliant upon network connectivity. When that connectivity falters, it can be extremely disruptive—and very costly.

According to a report in PCMag, an internet shutdown of one minute can cost a business like Amazon almost $978,000 in revenue losses. For Alphabet, the number is $538,000.

Further, the implications of downtime don’t just stop at revenues. In our digital economy, network outages make headlines. These issues can have an immediate and long-lasting impact on a company’s brand, customer loyalty, and more. What’s more, top leaders can face significant repercussions. For example, Australia’s second largest telecommunications firm lost its CEO after a high-profile outage hit the company.

When outages and issues occur, time is very literally money.

Given the high cost and other ramifications of network connectivity issues, fast and accurate isolation is critical. Quite simply, the faster teams can identify and resolve issues, the faster they can mitigate the customer and business impact.

Among today’s network operations teams, there’s an obvious, critical requirement: rapidly identifying issues that affect the users’ network delivery experience—so these problems can be addressed quickly. While this is an obvious need, the ability to address this demand is proving highly elusive for many teams.

The solution: DX NetOps

DX NetOps is a scalable, on-premises software solution that delivers advanced capabilities in such areas as network analytics, operator dashboards, data correlation, and third-party integration. The solution provides key capabilities teams need to do fast and accurate isolation of issues.

End-to-end network coverage

DX NetOps provides at-a-glance views of the entire global network infrastructure, including across multi-vendor technologies and traditional and new environments, including software-defined networks. DX NetOps enables teams to monitor internal and externally managed networks, including cloud, ISP, and other third-party environments.

The solution offers complete coverage of Wi-Fi networks. It provides an intuitive, searchable inventory of Wi-Fi infrastructure, and it offers intelligent correlation, so, for example, engineers can assess whether LAN issues are affecting Wi-Fi performance.

Intelligent event correlation and noise reduction

The solution offers proven, scalable, multi-vendor data collection and correlation. It also delivers advanced alarm noise reduction and analytics.

Comprehensive alarm management

DX NetOps offers automated integration with ticketing systems, including ServiceNow, ServiceDesk, Remedy, and others. This integration enables instant escalation to level two and three operators and engineers. With its comprehensive coverage and advanced capabilities, the solution enables teams to establish standard operating procedure workflows that promote consistency, speed, and efficiency. The solution offers support for 40,000 workflows out of the box, and administrators can modify these workflows and add new ones at any time.

Intuitive, actionable insights

DX NetOps delivers insights that are intuitive and actionable. For example, the solution offers top-10 lists that highlight the highest priority issues that teams need to address. With the solution, teams can rapidly determine whether performance issues have an impact on business services and users. The solution makes it easy for engineers to drill down to get details on specific systems that make up part of the network delivery experience.

How DX NetOps speeds issue isolation: Sample use cases

1. Using network topologies to understand impact

Through the DX NetOps console, users can see weighted values in terms of the importance of outages. For example, an operator can immediately spot a device with a high, 111 rating. They can also immediately see that the device is not responding, that a lot of associated devices are affected, and that access to several sites has been lost.

Out of the box, DX NetOps provides symptoms, probable causes of the issue, and tips for addressing it. Through the solution console, engineers can acknowledge alarms and assign a specific team member to handle troubleshooting.

2. Built-in root cause analysis

Through the DX NetOps console, operators can view different kinds of alarms from different sources, including those from the AppNeta by Broadcom. The solution enables users to spot such issues as duplex mismatches and BGP peering alarms.

From a single console, users can perform a wide range of activities:

• View a comprehensive, correlated set of data. For example, engineers can combine SNMP poll data with flow data.
• Test response time, spotting where transmissions have high latency, such as an HTTP test connection.
• Go to a context page and gain a 360-degree view of a router, including CPU, memory, and interface utilization; where located; contact status; time attributes; system health;  and historical performance.
• Review top conversations and identify those apps consuming all the bandwidth on a given connection.
• Go to an alarm view, open a ticket, and assign someone to examine why a given process is consuming an inordinate amount of bandwidth.

This example offers a vivid illustration of how DX NetOps delivers a breadth of data. With the solution, users can often identify the cause of an issue within just a couple mouse clicks.

Conclusion

In this post, we’ve illustrated just how fast and easy it is to determine the root cause of an issue with DX NetOps. Users can identify the root cause of issues in a number of ways. They can receive an alert to a fault, or they can do discovery via protocol mapping or pulling various types of data, including SNMP and flow data. 

DX NetOps enables teams to get a view of global network operations, across all vendors, technologies, and environments. This can only happen with a scalable, resilient solution like DX NetOps.

To learn more and see a demonstration of the solution in action, be sure to watch our Small Bytes session, Gain Rapid and Accurate Isolation of Modern Network Performance. In addition, you can review our in-depth white paper, Rapid and Accurate Isolation of Issues in Modern Networks.