Scaling Monitoring Administration with Experience-Driven NetOps: AppNeta and DX NetOps

Today, pretty much every critical business service, every critical employee job function, every critical customer transaction, and so much more are all reliant upon network connectivity. It falls to network operations (NetOps) teams to ensure network connections continue to support these demands.

Over time, the scale and the complexity of the networks the organization relies upon have continued to grow, making the job of NetOps teams increasingly challenging. To contend with the ever-increasing size and complexity of modern networks, and ensure critical business services continue to operate optimally, these groups must be able to scale their capabilities.

Scaling monitoring with AppNeta and DX NetOps

With Broadcom’s Experience-driven NetOps solution, which includes AppNeta and DX NetOps, teams can leverage advanced capabilities that deliver unified coverage of their increasingly large and complex network environments. As a result, they can streamline and scale ongoing monitoring, administration, and remediation.

With these solutions, teams can leverage active monitoring of end-to-end network delivery paths. In this way, they can gain visibility into the end user experience, even when connectivity spans internal networks and external, third-party networks, including those of cloud providers and ISPs.

Network paths

One way the solutions provide these advantages is through AppNeta network paths. With AppNeta’s patented TruPath technology, teams can view and track the network hops that occur in the users’ network path, from the user location to the app the business service relies upon.

An application delivery path, or network path, is the route a transmission takes to reach its target. More specifically, the path represents a hop of layer-two traffic that spans from the monitoring source to the target. AppNeta’s active monitoring can target TCP/IP networks, fully qualified domain names (FQDNs), or another monitoring endpoint.

With AppNeta, teams can do bi-directional monitoring, in which monitoring endpoints are installed in two locations to offer views into asymmetric routing. The solution also offers support for single-ended monitoring approaches. This can be useful in cases in which administrators can’t install a monitoring agent, such as a vendor’s SaaS application.

Through this active monitoring, teams can track how network paths change over time, including when traffic spans third-party networks, including those of an ISP, dynamic middle miles, security layers, and cloud apps, such as Office 365 or Microsoft Teams.

These solutions offer teams the visibility to identify where in complex, dynamic network paths errors may be occurring, even if they’re arising in third-party domains. This persistent visibility is especially vital in highly dynamic cloud environments.

Tagging enables logical grouping

Active testing of modern, dynamic environments can create a lot of route data. To efficiently monitor enterprise-scale environments, teams must establish hierarchical, well-organized monitoring coverage and views, so they can extract maximum value from all the data being generated.

AppNeta offers tagging capabilities that are instrumental in establishing intuitive and efficient monitoring. The solution’s tagging capabilities enable administrators to categorize, correlate, and contextualize their intelligence.

Tags are what are known as “key:value” pairs. Tags are fast and easy to set up. Within AppNeta, there are two types of tags: pre-built system tags and custom tags. Through tagging, administrators can establish logical groupings, including by the following criteria:

• Location. Tags enable teams to group by location, including city, state, country, and by custom regions, such as EU, Western US, and so on.
• Applications. Teams can be established for specific app or type of app, including for Office 365 suite or Salesforce CRM.
• Company group. Tags can be applied for organizational groups, such as business units or departments.
• Connection type. Teams can tag on specific types of connections, including those of a specific provider, such as an ISP or cloud provider, or for a specific security technology. This can be especially helpful in hybrid work scenarios. For example, if a team is alerted to the fact a specific regional ISP has experienced downtime, a team can search by that ISP and determine whether business users are affected, and, if so, how many.
• Device type. Settings can be based on OS, model, manufacturer, and more.

Organizing network paths in NetOps portal

DX NetOps portal provides flexible, easy-to-use dynamic grouping rules that work in tandem with AppNeta-defined tags. With these rules, groupings can stay current automatically, even as new systems are added to inventory or attributes change.

The solution also features hierarchical scorecard views that make it easy to understand performance across key groups, such as app types, ISPs, departments, regions, and so on. From these views, administrators can drill down into specifics in terms of delivery and managed network performance.

How organizations benefit

With Broadcom’s Experience-driven NetOps, operations teams can gain the speed, efficiency, and intelligence that are vital to scaling monitoring administration. The solutions offer these advantages:

• Flexibility. With the solutions, teams can gain a great deal of flexibility, and effectively adapt their coverage and views to the specific needs of their organization, technologies, and users.  For example, for the most critical business apps, operators can establish tighter threshold bands than those of other less critical apps. Also, teams can easily spot which regions of SaaS providers’ networks are performing most poorly, for example, or view the worst performing network path by ISP provider.  
• Efficiency. Through the solutions’ advanced grouping capabilities, teams can adapt monitoring to dynamically changing environments with unparalleled efficiency. With minimal administrative efforts, dynamically defined and updated groups remain consistently up to date.
• High-level insights. The solutions enable teams to add critical technological, organizational, and business context to monitoring data. Consequently, operators and managers can make more informed decisions around prioritization and investments.

Conclusion

With Broadcom, teams can more effectively scale their operations, and contend with the proliferating demands of today’s modern networks. To learn more, be sure to watch our Small Bytes presentation about using AppNeta network paths to create dynamic groups in DX NetOps. Get a detailed demonstration of how these solutions provide rich, contextual insights that enable more efficient, effective, and scalable operations.