WAN Management: Optimize User Experience and Maximize Cost Savings

For IT operations teams running modern networks, the work can be challenging and thankless. These teams don’t ever receive congratulatory messages from executives when a video conference operates flawlessly—they only hear complaints when those sessions are problematic.

Here’s another thing they won’t ever hear from their executive team: “Money’s no object, your team can spend as much as you want.” While these realities aren’t necessarily new, the challenges these teams confront have certainly continued to evolve and intensify.

These teams must continue to ensure service levels remain optimized at all times—in spite of the fact that networks keep getting more dynamic, more complex, and more highly reliant on diverse technologies and vendors. While demands and burgeoning complexity may feel limitless, the same can’t be said for staffing and budgets.

Requirement: Find opportunities for cost reduction, while ensuring optimized user experience

The trick is ensuring service levels for users remain constant and optimal, while minimizing the expenses associated with IT operations. Given the nature of modern networks, teams can’t make decisions solely based on the wide area network (WAN) resources they’re responsible for. Users are now highly reliant upon networks and services from third-party vendors. For example, a work-from-home user will be reliant upon a home Wi-Fi network and an ISP connection. IT teams can’t establish SLAs for these third-party environments, and they can’t directly monitor the internal workings of these networks.

Are users experiencing congestion issues because some users are streaming movies, there’s an issue with Wi-Fi, or there’s performance degradation on the ISP network? Many IT operations teams are currently contending with blind spots, unable to answer these questions. Consequently, it is difficult to gain the holistic visibility needed to make intelligent WAN optimization decisions.

Network Observability by Broadcom is the solution

Network Observability by Broadcom has been proven to help teams improve WAN performance and utilization, and in the process the solution has saved customers millions of dollars in network bandwidth expenses. The solution features DX NetOps by Broadcom. For years, DX NetOps has helped teams gain visibility across circuits and technologies from different vendors. With the product, teams can group devices, assess past performance, conduct statistical analysis, and make informed capacity projections.

Example of a capacity planning scorecard view

DX NetOps enables teams to gain end-to-end visibility of network paths, including across internally and externally managed networks. Teams can gain a holistic understanding of performance over time, so they can readily identify meaningful deviations from normal behavior and make intelligent capacity projections.

Key capabilities

DX NetOps offers teams these vital capabilities:

• Monitor and manage key performance indicators (KPIs). To realize gains, groups must be able to measure KPIs, such as utilization, packet loss, quality of service, and latency. With DX NetOps, teams can establish effective baselines for these metrics, so they can monitor, manage, and improve performance.
• Track user experience. DX NetOps features integration with AppNeta by Broadcom, enabling teams to employ synthetic transactions to measure response times of user interactions. In addition, the solution features integrations with tools provided by network equipment vendors, such as technologies like IPSLA. With these capabilities, teams can effectively measure performance over time, and make data-driven projections.
• Track applications and services. DX NetOps enables teams to gain correlated visibility into applications and business services, along with network performance. This correlation is vital in enabling teams to ensure business-critical applications are being given the resources needed to deliver the optimized performance required. In addition, groups can view the applications running over high-priority networks, and validate whether they are the right ones to be consuming the bandwidth.
• Offer visibility into software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). In order to maximize flexibility and cost savings, organizations continue to navigate from legacy networks, like MPLS, to SD-WAN. Proactive monitoring and management of service levels throughout the migration to SD-WAN is essential—teams don’t want to wait for users to complain to find out there’s an issue. DX NetOps offers the capabilities needed to support teams, before, during, and after their SD-WAN migrations. The product offers visibility into the performance of the overlay and underlay infrastructure. The offering features capabilities for measuring data and voice loss, jitter, and mean opinion score (MOS). DX NetOps also enables teams to validate that SD-WAN controllers are working correctly.

The proven insights, benefits of DX NetOps

By employing DX NetOps, teams can achieve the following benefits:

• Uncover significant cost savings. With DX NetOps, teams get the insights they need to identify overlapping or unnecessary resources. Users can make informed decisions about whether to consolidate, close, or decommission specific sites or equipment. The solution supports the seamless migration to SD-WAN, while ensuring optimized service levels. With these capabilities, DX NetOps has enabled customers to realize dramatic cost savings. For example, one customer reduced costs by 38%, which amounted to millions of dollars in savings.
• Make the most of limited bandwidth. DX NetOps delivers the critical intelligence teams need to understand how much bandwidth is being used, and how much isn’t being used. With the solution, teams can gain the insights needed to increase throughput, reduce latency, and minimize packet loss.
• Optimize user experience. DX NetOps helps teams improve user experience, especially for users working with business-critical and time-sensitive applications and services.
• Speed triage and resolution. Through its integration with AppNeta, DX NetOps enables teams to do continuous, low impact, and active testing of network delivery. These capabilities speed root cause analysis. Teams can quickly see where issues are occurring and drill down to get more details. Further, the product delivers unified visibility and supports best practice triage workflows.

Conclusion

Ensuring optimized performance for business-critical, network-supported services is a vital mandate for today’s IT operations teams. These groups have to be able to meet this mandate, while managing budgets and making the most of the limited resources available.

With Network Observability by Broadcom, teams can gain the visibility they need to ensure optimized service levels, while reducing total cost of ownership. To learn more, be sure to watch our Small Bytes session, How to Use WAN Optimization to Uncover Major Cost Savings for Your Business.

Our Small Bytes series offers practical examples on getting the most from Broadcom solution investments. Be sure to visit our Small Bytes page to see a complete list of upcoming and on-demand presentations in the series.