The evolving private cloud landscape introduces critical blind spots. As private clouds integrate with third-party applications, SaaS providers, and public clouds like Google, Azure, and AWS, the network grows increasingly intricate. This complexity often leads to finger pointing when application performance suffers, making it difficult to pinpoint whether the problem lies within your private cloud or an external service. While native cloud tools offer deep visibility within the private cloud, they often fall short in monitoring these critical external paths and user experiences from remote locations. This leaves leaders struggling with a key question: “How can I eliminate network blind spots between my private cloud and SaaS applications?”
Navigating the complexities of modern private cloud environments requires more than just traditional monitoring tools. It demands a holistic approach to network visibility, extending beyond your immediate infrastructure to encompass every crucial connection that affects your applications and users. This is where network observability for private cloud becomes indispensable, transforming how teams manage performance, troubleshoot issues, and ensure seamless digital experiences.
Network Observability by Broadcom addresses these requirements. The solution extends visibility across the entire application delivery path, ensuring performance everywhere your private cloud connects. It provides proactive insights, eliminating critical blind spots by monitoring performance from private clouds to public clouds, critical SaaS applications (such as ServiceNow or Microsoft Office 365), and remote branch offices. This includes detailing crucial metrics like latency, jitter, and packet loss. This comprehensive view is vital for rapid root cause analysis, enabling your teams to quickly identify whether performance issues originate within your private cloud or with external services and dependencies. (See our prior post to learn more about extending visibility beyond the virtual wall of private cloud environments.)
Let's explore four core customer use cases that highlight the immense value of adopting Network Observability by Broadcom. To read more, check out our guide to network observability for private cloud.
1. Proactively addressing WAN performance degradation
IT organizations frequently face complaints about general slowness between offices and data center-hosted applications. Often, these issues are blamed on the network. This problem typically involves critical application performance traversing the WAN, where the health of enterprise locations and application performance are key concerns.
What are the best ways to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) in complex multi-vendor network environments?
Network Observability by Broadcom safeguards your critical applications by proactively catching configuration errors and network degradation—before they have an impact on users. When disruptions do occur, it drastically reduces your MTTR. With the solution, you can pinpoint the exact device and root cause in minutes, even across complex, multi-vendor environments. Additionally, the solution delivers objective, hop-by-hop visibility across all your network segments, equipping you with the objective data needed to confidently hold ISPs and cloud providers accountable for meeting their service level agreements (SLAs).
2. Mitigating configuration drift and unexpected changes
One of the most insidious challenges in complex environments is configuration drift or unmanaged changes, which can lead to widespread issues. A single change to a switch configuration, for instance, can have a significant impact. Often, traditional tools simply can’t pinpoint these changes.
Network Observability by Broadcom empowers your team to proactively maintain a reliable, high-performing infrastructure. With the solution, teams can validate physical connectivity and configuration compliance, before workloads are even deployed. (See our prior post to learn more about mastering network configuration management.)
The solution promotes operational efficiency by instantly flagging configuration deviations and simplifying device updates, so you can save time and ensure your network stays secure and compliant. Further, by breaking down traditional data silos into a single, actionable view of your entire network and private cloud, it significantly accelerates troubleshooting, root cause identification, and issue resolution.
3. Ensuring application and service availability within the private cloud
Users often encounter problems, such as difficulty logging into private cloud-hosted web services or a lack of connectivity to critical components, for example VMware NSX load balancers. A significant challenge is that limited application visibility, particularly at layer 7, can expose user experience to hidden bottlenecks and latency. Waiting for end users to complain about slow web application performance is a costly, brand-damaging approach.
Network Observability by Broadcom maximizes application uptime and optimizes user experiences, helping teams identify and address issues before they ever affect your end users. By utilizing synthetic transaction monitoring to simulate real user workflows from multiple locations, the solution ensures your critical private cloud applications remain continuously responsive. When performance degradations do occur, it drastically accelerates root cause analysis by instantly differentiating between application, virtual network, and physical infrastructure problems. Ultimately, it empowers your team to confidently deploy or migrate new applications. You can ensure flawless day-one performance while continuously validating compliance with your critical SLAs.
4. Automating issue detection in the physical network
When poor performance occurs, especially with services hosted within a private cloud or that require connectivity to third-party SaaS instances, the private cloud team might suspect the issue is outside their domain but lack the ability to definitively prove it. This often leads to lengthy reviews, difficulty isolating specific physical network faults, and unproductive finger pointing. A common example of this is when performance issues are ultimately traced to a configuration change on a single switch, but the tools in place couldn't isolate the issue.
Network Observability by Broadcom eliminates costly finger pointing and drastically reduces mean time to innocence (MTTI) by providing undeniable, data-driven proof of your network and private cloud's health.
The solution delivers comprehensive, end-to-end visibility across entire application delivery paths—including those spanning private and public clouds, critical SaaS applications, and remote branches—so you never experience blind spots across your multi-vendor or SD-WAN environments. When disruptions do occur, advanced hop-by-hop diagnostics provide real-time metrics that instantly pinpoint the exact device or network segment at fault. This empowers your team to resolve issues in minutes, confidently validate underlay network performance, and effectively hold ISPs or third-party vendors accountable.
Conclusion
Network Observability by Broadcom provides a single source of truth that unites operations teams and eliminates subjective finger pointing. With these capabilities, you can transition from reactive troubleshooting to proactively ensuring optimized performance. The solution delivers immense strategic value by enabling data-driven capacity planning, so you can right-size infrastructure and minimize your total cost of ownership. By automating monitoring and accelerating root cause analysis, it drastically reduces resolution times and operational expenses.
Ultimately, the solution takes the risk out of major IT transformations—such as cloud migrations and SD-WAN rollouts. It empowers your teams to confidently maintain resilience, ensure peak performance, and achieve five-nines uptime across your entire digital ecosystem. To read more, check out our guide to network observability for private cloud.
Frequently asked questions
How does network observability differ from native private cloud monitoring tools?
Native cloud monitoring tools typically focus deep within the private cloud perimeter but fail to see the external paths, SaaS connections, and other domains that affect application delivery and remote user experiences. Network observability extends this visibility across the entire delivery path, including third-party and public cloud segments.
What is mean time to innocence (MTTI) and why is it important?
MTTI is the speed at which a network team can prove that a performance issue is not caused by the network infrastructure. Network Observability by Broadcom provides the data-driven proof needed to eliminate finger pointing and quickly redirect troubleshooting efforts to the actual root cause, whether it's an application error or an issue in an ISP or a SaaS provider environment.
Can network observability help prevent issues before they affect users?
Yes. By using synthetic transaction monitoring to simulate user workflows and proactively flagging configuration drift or network degradation, the solution identifies bottlenecks and errors before they affect the end-user experience.
Which metrics does the solution track?
Network Observability by Broadcom provides detailed visibility into crucial metrics, including latency, jitter, and packet loss, across every hop of the network path.
