VMware Edge Network Intelligence: Proactively Solving App Issues with Lightning Speed

We can’t wait for VMworld 2021 and as we race toward this exciting event, our blog series showcasing VMware SASE rolls on. Following last week’s blog on SASE, today, we’ll focus on how VMware Edge Network Intelligence^™ can help IT teams proactively manage client experiences at the enterprise edge.

During the pandemic era, where many employees work from home, IT teams must safeguard business continuity while ensuring productivity across the enterprise.

However, teams often must adopt a reactive posture, grappling with issues such as addressing user downtime. For example, if a user can’t access their cloud apps, IT must spend considerable time utilizing numerous antiquated tools to learn if the issue is related to user access, the app, or the network.

What if there was a better way?

To deliver a powerful end-user and IoT device experience at the edge of a distributed enterprise, IT teams can use VMware Edge Network Intelligence — an artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) solution and key component of VMware SASE.

VMware Edge Network Intelligence helps teams rapidly shift from a reactive mode to a proactive mode, enabling them to view the entire network and automate actions for self-healing — stopping a problem before it spreads to numerous users.  

Inside VMware Edge Network Intelligence

Distributed workers are increasingly moving from on-premises apps to cloud-based apps. In fact, 95% of IT organizations are seeing a surge in real-time application traffic, such as voice, video, and screensharing, as distributed teams have expanded and need to collaborate remotely. This challenges IT teams, who must rely on obsolete tools to track and troubleshoot billions of points each day across the entire enterprise landscape — and without sophisticated scaling tools, this task proves impossible.

By harnessing the power of VMware Edge Network Intelligence, teams are solving this problem, reliably providing SASE at scale. It combines artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and next-gen analytics to automate and enhance IT management, find anomalies, execute automatic security incident remediation, and other critical tasks.

VMware Edge Network Intelligence delivers a deep dive into what’s really happening to significantly boost IT operational efficiency. The solution examines network performance issues to fully understand the end-to-end app experience for individual users. And by using AIOps, 90% of IT professionals believe this will result in improved business outcomes for their organizations.

Finding and Fixing Issues Fast

It starts by analyzing the transactions of every end-client device on your network as they connect and access business applications. To do this with SASE, all it takes is enabling VMware Edge Network Intelligence in the VMware SD-WAN Orchestrator and you are good to go. 

Traditionally, IT teams require months to manually track issues and establish thresholds for network performance. This proves to be time-consuming and requires significant guesswork.

VMware Edge Network Intelligence substantially speeds this process, leveraging automation to determine baselines for normal vs abnormal network behavior.

How does this work?

First, VMware Edge Network Intelligence automatically collects data from multiple points — spanning the client LAN, the enterprise WAN, the internet, and the data center LAN — to detect faulty segments and network issues.

This results in a massive catalog of baseline information that helps IT teams understand the normal behavior for network activity and app performance.

Next, VMware Edge Network Intelligence algorithms study this network data to generate models, which spotlight where problems occur and their possible impact.

The algorithms also analyze historical network data and create models to help understand where problems are arising and their potential impact.

But it’s not enough to know that a user is having issues with a SASE service — teams need to know why the problem is happening. For this, they rely on VMware Edge Network Intelligence to run a root cause analysis by correlating all the collected data across the network stack, leading to the system isolating the fault and providing steps for proactive self-healing.

Learn more

• For a closer look at VMware Edge Network Intelligence, read the white paper, “Edge Network Intelligence and AIOps” here.
• Want to learn more about SD-WAN and SASE? Register now for VMworld, which features almost 70 sessions, panels, hands-on labs, and keynotes related to SASE, cloud networking and the emerging edge.
• Be sure to read the technical book, “Journey into the World of SASE” to get expert insights on SASE and why it’s important

Join us again next week, where our blog series continues, exploring how you can implement SASE in your organization. See you there!