Why Network Observability by Broadcom is Essential for Hybrid Cloud Success

Network Observability by Broadcom, offered as an Advanced Service for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), becomes indispensable, bridging critical visibility gaps and empowering organizations to realize the full value of their cloud investments. VCF is the backbone for modern private and hybrid cloud strategies, offering unprecedented agility and scale. However, as environments extend to encompass third-party applications, SaaS, and public cloud integrations such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, a critical challenge emerges: ensuring performance from the VCF perimeter to enterprise locations and apps hosted outside of VCF. This growing complexity leads to finger-pointing and costly delays when application performance suffers.

Why do traditional monitoring tools fall short when it comes to the cloud?

Traditional network monitoring tools are insufficient for managing the complexities of hybrid cloud environments because they lack end-to-end visibility beyond the private cloud perimeter. The modern IT landscape is characterized by distributed applications and infrastructure, spanning multiple public clouds, on-premises data centers, and edge locations. While some tools provide deep visibility within the private cloud, native cloud tools cannot accurately see external paths to public clouds, SaaS applications, or remote user locations. This creates significant network blind spots that traditional tools, often relying on legacy methods like SNMP and NetFlow, cannot address. These legacy tools are device‑centric and fail in abstracted environments. These tools struggle to provide granular insights into external networks operated by ISPs and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), where direct infrastructure access is limited or non-existent. This visibility gap means that when an application runs poorly, it’s incredibly difficult to isolate the root cause, leading to frustrated users and prolonged troubleshooting.

Network Observability for VCF Environments

Network Observability extends VCF monitoring capabilities with comprehensive, end-to-end visibility across the external network overlay, underlay, and applications, empowering teams to proactively manage performance and accelerate root cause analysis. Network Observability enhances visibility offered by VCF to external clouds, networks and environments. It directly addresses the network blind spot challenge by extending monitoring capabilities beyond the traditional private cloud perimeter. For Cloud or Network Operations teams—those responsible for managing and maintaining an organization’s network infrastructure—this solution provides crucial insights, ensuring they are not guilty until proven innocent when performance issues arise. It transforms monitoring from a reactive, operational task into a proactive mechanism for architectural assurance.

Optimize VCF Migrations with Additional Visibility

Network Observability enables organizations to confidently execute cloud migrations by establishing performance baselines pre-migration, providing real-time monitoring during the transition, and continuously validating performance post-migration to assure user experience. Large-scale network transformations, such as VCF deployments or cloud migrations, are inherently difficult. Network Observability provides the critical performance baseline, validation, and continuous monitoring needed throughout any transformation lifecycle.

• Before Migration: Establish a baseline of current performance for business-critical apps and networks to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
• During Migration: Monitor network performance in real-time as resources are deployed to new sites or workloads migrate, quickly identifying and resolving new issues.
• After Migration: Continuously validate the success of the transformation, ensuring the new network fabric performs as expected and delivers promised benefits, thus providing quantifiable proof of improved performance. This approach significantly reduces risk and downtime, accelerating rollout phases by proactively identifying issues.

As highlighted in the VMUG (VMware User Group) Cloud Operations and VCF User Experience Report 2026, establishing a performance baseline of critical applications and networks with a robust network observability solution is a formal recommendation before migrating resources.

Cross-Cloud Networking: Eliminating Hybrid Cloud Blind Spots

Network Observability provides end-to-end network performance across hybrid environments, including public clouds and SaaS applications, enabling rapid isolation of root causes for performance issues. In a cloud reality where enterprises leverage two or more public cloud providers, and users access resources from anywhere, gaining a holistic view of network performance is complex. Network Observability extends visibility from within your VCF instances to public clouds (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud), SaaS applications (ServiceNow, Office 365, Workday), and other providers. This capability provides active, synthetic testing from on-premise locations to SaaS and public cloud services, helping pinpoint latency, jitter, and packet loss hop-by-hop across network paths. It’s crucial for understanding how the performance of unowned networks—such as ISP backbones and transit to VPCs—impact your VCF environment.

End-User Experience Validation: Proactive Performance Assurance

Through synthetic transaction monitoring and performance baselines, Network Observability proactively ensures optimal application performance from the user’s perspective, 24/7, even before users complain. Waiting for users to complain about slow web application performance, especially for critical apps, is reactive and damaging. Network Observability employs synthetic transaction monitoring that continuously simulates user workflows from various points, including from within your VCF environment or branch offices. These Monitoring Points perform actions like logging in, navigating pages, and filling out forms, allowing you to:

• Identify Issues Before Users Do: Proactively detect slowdowns or failures.
• Baseline & Trend Performance: Establish “normal” performance and receive alerts for deviations.
• Validate App Readiness: Ensure new or migrated web applications perform optimally from day one.
• SLA Validation: Objectively measure and validate performance against internal or external Service Level Agreements. This ensures an optimal end-user and application endpoint experience.

How do you get Continuous Visibility for Private Cloud – Beyond the Perimeter?

Network Observability provides a unified view of fragmented topologies and continuous validation of connectivity, ensuring the health of enterprise locations connecting to VCF and reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) for critical application issues traversing the WAN. Maintaining visibility within the private cloud is critical, but the network often extends far beyond. Network Observability offers an intuitive topology mapping for infrastructure, ensuring the health of enterprise locations connecting users to cloud environments with network configuration management (NCM) to detect issues like configuration drifts. It helps identify performance issues to reduce the MTTR of critical applications traversing the WAN. By correlating network data across various domains, it tears down silos between traditional network and private cloud teams, providing a single, actionable view. This enhanced visibility is crucial for validating connectivity between VCF and external network environments.

The Data Speaks: Why Network Observability is Critical for Success

Network performance is non-negotiable, with data from the VMUG Cloud Operations and VCF User Experience Report 2026 highlighting its critical role and the necessity of cross-functional collaboration. The survey of 822 VMUG members, underscores the indispensable nature of network observability for VCF environments. Key findings include:

• Network Performance is Non-Negotiable: A substantial 65% of respondents view network performance as “very important” for cloud applications to meet business and user expectations, directly linking network health to positive business outcomes. When troubleshooting, 40% immediately use network monitoring tools with end-to-end visibility as their first step.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration is Key: Operational excellence is a team sport. 56% of organizations manage user experience through cross-functional visibility, indicating integrating data and insights across teams is a dominant best practice. Furthermore, 52% proactively engage with their NetOps team on a daily or weekly cadence, recognizing the network team’s essential role in prevention and rapid resolution.
• Adoption is Coming: 37% plan to transition to VCF 9 within the next 12 months, while another segment (43%) will wait 18+ months, prioritizing preparedness over immediate migration. This makes pre-migration baselining with observability possible by starting pre-migration.

Conclusion

Network Observability by Broadcom is a fundamental component for successful hybrid cloud network management, providing end-to-end visibility and data-driven insights to optimize performance, enhance end-user experience, and reduce project risks. Network Observability by Broadcom delivers continuous, objective data that validates the integrity of the end-to-end service delivery path, moving performance discussions from subjective finger-pointing to data-backed analysis. By extending visibility beyond the private cloud perimeter, it helps reduce network blind spots, optimize cloud migrations, simplify hybrid cloud network management, and ensure an unparalleled end-user experience. This comprehensive approach ensures that your cloud architecture delivers on its strategic business objectives and achieves peak performance.

FAQ

• What is Network Observability by Broadcom ?
  Network Observability by Broadcom is an Advanced Service for VCF that provides end-to-end network and application visibility across hybrid environments, extending beyond the private cloud perimeter to public clouds, SaaS, and remote users.
  • Check out the Virtually Speaking podcast on Network Observability
• How does Network Observability help with cloud migrations?
  It establishes performance baselines before migration, monitors in real-time during, and continuously validates performance after, reducing risk, accelerating rollouts, and proving success with objective metrics.
• Can Network Observability validate end-user experience for VCF-based applications?
  Yes, it uses synthetic transaction monitoring to continuously simulate user workflows, proactively detecting slowdowns and validating performance from the end-user’s perspective 24/7, ensuring optimal application readiness and SLA validation.
• Why is cross-functional collaboration important for cloud performance?
  The VMUG 2026 Report states 56% of organizations use cross-functional visibility for user experience and 52% engage NetOps daily/weekly for troubleshooting, emphasizing teamwork for operational excellence and rapid issue resolution.