Optimizing VPN Performance and Availability with Network Observability by Broadcom

In recent years, hybrid work approaches have grown increasingly commonplace, and for a significant percentage of users, VPN is the go-to approach for accessing secured corporate resources and services. In fact, one article reveals that 72% of desktop and laptop users employ a VPN.

As the reliance on hybrid work models and VPN connectivity continues to grow, VPN health has emerged as a critical success factor for businesses. If VPN users experience poor, erratic performance or downtime, they can contend with significant disruptions. As a consequence, user productivity, and business results, can suffer.

Challenge of tracking VPN health

For IT and network operations teams, it is vital to ensure that VPN users have an optimized experience. The challenge is that monitoring and managing service levels is now extremely complex.

Issues can arise on the data center side for a range of reasons, including expired licenses, dropped connections, maxed out gateways, and many more. In addition, an issue can occur on the users’ side, such as on the users’ ISP network, the Wi-Fi they’re using at home or in a café, and so on.

The solution: Network Observability by Broadcom

Network Observability by Broadcom equips operators with a unified, end-to-end view of traditional networks as well as modern Wi-Fi, software-defined, and multi-cloud environments. The solution provides the visibility that teams need to ensure VPN networks are continuously delivering optimized availability and performance.

With the solution, teams can establish monitoring dashboards and alerts that enable more proactive management. With the solution, teams can:

• Discover key infrastructure, including VPN gateways and WAN interfaces.
• Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Gain fast, intelligent insights into problem areas, so they can immediately focus on resolution or escalation.

The solution offers unified alarm workflows, tracks concurrent connection trends, and reports on license counts for VPN connections.

Key solution offerings

Network Observability by Broadcom features these products:

• DX NetOps. DX NetOps is a scalable, on-premises software offering that delivers advanced capabilities in such areas as network analytics, operator dashboards, data correlation, and third-party integration.
• AppNeta. With AppNeta, teams can actively monitor network delivery experience over paths to cloud, SaaS, and other external sites. AppNeta enables IT operations teams to fully understand how performance is affected by common issues like application outages, route changes, connectivity drops, and ISP peering changes.

Extensive coverage of network performance metrics

In VPN environments, AppNeta can monitor various KPIs. The product’s continuous path monitoring enables extensive coverage of these network performance metrics:

• Connectivity
• Capacity
• Data loss
• Data jitter
• Latency
• Round-trip time (RTT)
• Voice loss
• Voice jitter
• Mean opinion score (MOS)

DX NetOps, AppNeta integration

With these integrated products, teams can bring together fault, performance, flow, and user experience data into the DX NetOps portal. Operators can view active monitoring data in the DX NetOps portal, just as they would monitor other metric families. Through its integration with DX NetOps, AppNeta enables teams to leverage time-over-threshold and deviation-from-normal alerting.

Deployment flexibility

AppNeta features a range of hardware and software options:

• Hardware. Customers can choose from a range of appliances, from those for a small office to those with 100 Gbps interfaces.
• Software. AppNeta offers support for VMs and Docker containers, as well as macOS and Windows workstation clients.

Conclusion

VPN connections represent a key way for today’s hybrid workers to get their jobs done. With Network Observability by Broadcom, you can establish the advanced monitoring needed to ensure VPN connectivity remains as reliable and responsive as possible.

To learn more, including a demo of the solution in action, be sure to watch our Small Bytes session, How to Use VPN Health Metrics to Optimize Hybrid Work Experiences. Our Small Bytes series offers practical examples on getting the most from Broadcom solution investments. Also, you can visit our Small Bytes page to see a complete list of upcoming and on-demand presentations in the series.