Stopping the Finger Pointing: Speed Mean Time to Innocence with AppNeta

When network issues arise, it doesn’t take long for fingers to start pointing—often in the direction of network operations teams. In such moments, being forced to rely on guesswork or speculative theories is the last thing any team wants. Making matters worse, even if answers are found, but it takes too long to arrive at them, the reputational damage, not to mention the negative repercussions of the actual outage, are already done.

In this post, we explore why it is more critical than ever for network operations teams to get fast, accurate answers. Plus, we’ll outline how AppNeta by Broadcom provides the visibility needed to navigate these challenges effectively.

Challenges posed by blind spots

Network operations teams are grappling with some significant obstacles these days. A research report offers a vivid picture of just how widespread these issues are:

• 80% of professionals say cloud and ISP networks introduce monitoring blind spots.
• 95% report that their current tools fail to provide the necessary visibility.
• 76% say slow or missing data impedes issue resolution.

The lack of complete, timely data prevents teams from understanding network activity in real time. These realities leave organizations vulnerable to a range of problems:

• Service outages and disruptions. Issues are only discovered after users are affected, making troubleshooting reactive and inefficient.
• Eroding business performance. Outages result in lost revenue, reduced productivity, and increased customer churn.
• Inability to hold service providers accountable. Without objective visibility, teams cannot prove ISPs or cloud providers are at fault, and they’re poorly positioned to negotiate better SLAs.
• Damaged internal reputation. Network teams are often the first to be blamed, even when issues are outside of their control. Either way, the reputational damage is done.

Key steps to prove innocence

To mitigate prolonged disruptions and maintain a strong reputation, network operations teams must be able to quickly, efficiently pinpoint where problems are occurring and accurately determine root causes. Here are the three key steps required.

1. Identify the problem

Teams must track network activity and application performance to understand the actual impact of an issue. For example, an ISP outage may be reported, but if no users are affected, the issue is not something network operations teams need to focus on. Diagnosing issues requires detailed, end-to-end intelligence, including at the application and user experience levels. For example, an app may encounter an issue that prevents user logins, while continuing to perform acceptably for users who had logged in before the issue arose. Gaining a nuanced understanding of these types of problems is vital in making sense of user-reported issues, and in quickly determining the root cause.

2. Isolate the problem location

Once an issue is identified, teams need to understand and isolate where the problem is happening. Today, this means being able to pinpoint issues in:

• Internally managed data centers.
• VMware Cloud Foundation environments.
• External ISP, SaaS, and cloud provider networks.

This ability to spot the problem’s location quickly is key to reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and mean time to innocence (MTTI).

3. Communicate findings

To break down silos and facilitate resolution, teams must be able to quickly and efficiently share findings with relevant groups. This includes teams and individuals within the enterprise, including network operations center staff, developers, cloud operations personnel, security operations teams, and business groups. In addition, it is important to be able to communicate and collaborate with external entities, including cloud providers, ISPs, and SaaS vendors.

Solution: Network Observability by Broadcom

Network Observability by Broadcom enables network operations teams to monitor, measure, and analyze network performance issues and outages. With the solution, network operations teams can quickly spot and address issues arising in their domains, identify issues in externally managed environments, and gain objective evidence to back up their findings.

The solution features AppNeta by Broadcom. AppNeta brings the end-user perspective to application and network performance monitoring. With the solution, network operations teams can gain an end-to-end understanding of network performance, no matter where users or critical applications may be.

AppNeta key capabilities

AppNeta delivers these advanced capabilities:

• Full-stack visibility. Without full visibility of the end-to-end network path, it is time consuming and difficult for teams to pinpoint the cause and location of an issue. AppNeta aggregates and correlates network and application data in one place, so teams can go to a single interface to track performance and analyze issues. AppNeta provides end-to-end visibility across user devices, applications, last-mile ISP or transit networks, cloud and virtual private cloud (VPC) environments, and more.
• Active and passive monitoring. AppNeta can provide monitoring visibility from both active and passive perspectives. Active monitoring provides visibility into the end-to-end network path, so operators can effectively understand the end-user experience. It also enables passive collection of traffic and device metrics that provide invaluable context for speeding troubleshooting.
• Continuous testing. AppNeta captures real-time data through continuous active testing. With the product, teams can track how network paths change over time. This provides critical visibility. For example, if an issue was detected an hour ago, teams can go back to the details captured at that time to pinpoint where and why the issue arose. This kind of retrospective assessment is only possible through continuous active testing.

Advantages: Stop the finger pointing with data-driven insights

In high-pressure “war-room” meetings, the best defense is access to real-time data. More critically, gaining comprehensive, unified insights can eliminate the need for these costly, time-consuming meetings.

With AppNeta, teams can:

• Immediately determine whether an issue falls within their domain or that of a third-party provider.
• Provide immediate insights into issues as they arise, including where they’re based and what they were caused by.
• Focus on solving actual problems instead of defending themselves against baseless accusations.
• Foster collaboration through data-driven insights, improving communication across teams and with external providers.
• Prevent the erosion of trust and build credibility within the organization.

Key benefits

By employing AppNeta, network operations teams can achieve the following benefits:

• Establish faster root cause identification and reduced MTTR.
• Eliminate stressful, time-consuming blame games in troubleshooting scenarios.
• Strengthen the network operations team’s credibility and reputation.

Reporting and visualization capabilities

AppNeta delivers powerful, intuitive visualizations that empower network operations teams to work faster, more efficiently, and more effectively. The product delivers these capabilities:

• Network quality reports. Maps network paths connecting critical user locations and services.
• Detailed performance metrics. Provides in-depth insights on data and voice communication quality. Reports on data jitter, latency, and loss; and voice loss and jitter; and Mean Opinion Score.
• Historical tracking. Shows current network paths and reveals how paths change over time. Enables teams to see how often a path violated a threshold during a given timeframe, whether due to an outage or substandard performance. Allows teams to do comparisons of current performance versus prior averages.
• Geographic visibility. Delivers at-a-glance visibility into various regions and domains, enabling fast detection of problematic areas. Reveals where on a given path issues are arising, whether they’re occurring on-premises or in an ISP or cloud provider environment.
• Data sharing. Equips teams with the ability to export and share reports for enhanced collaboration, including with internal teams and third-party service providers.

Conclusion

For network operations teams, proving innocence and maintaining trust requires real-time visibility and actionable insights. By leveraging Network Observability by Broadcom, teams can eliminate blind spots, streamline troubleshooting, and confidently address network performance issues—ultimately stopping the finger pointing before it starts. To learn more, be sure to view our recent Small Bytes webcast, Prove NetOps Innocence With ISP-Cloud Network Performance Visibility.