As VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN continues to deliver optimized performance, optimized latency, and lower communication costs, the need for deeper visibility and insights across these complex networks has only increased. VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO) provides a robust management interface, yet as organizations expand their network infrastructure, challenges with visibility into third-party networks, public internet connections, and multi-cloud environments arise. To overcome these challenges, AppNeta by Broadcom complements VeloCloud’s capabilities.
AppNeta and VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator
VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator is a comprehensive, single-pane-of-glass solution designed to configure, manage, monitor, and troubleshoot both network and security functions. It enhances operational efficiency and optimization through features like real-time monitoring, historic data reporting, and granular application-aware visibility, all of which support informed decision-making.
VECO offers:
Intuitive dashboards that provide visualizations of site performance and link quality. These dashboards feature built-in charts that display key metrics such as top applications, users, and bandwidth usage.
Granular visibility into network performance, with features like link quality scoring and flow statistics. It enables detailed monitoring at the level of individual sites, links, flows, and applications, along with real-time measurement of link performance.
Both on-premises and cloud-based logging capabilities for event tracking and reporting. It also delivers real-time events and alerts, along with customizable reports that can be tailored for both business and IT purposes, based on aggregated data from across the network.
AppNeta extends VECO’s end-to-end visibility addressing critical aspects like hop-by-hop performance monitoring and Service Provider Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance across diverse network environments. The net impact of these insights is that you can use it as forensic evidence when opening a support case with the impacted SP and you could make independent peering or business policy changes to circumvent the detected issue. While SD-WAN aims to protect application performance from network impairments, if the issue persists, a more institutionalized action may be warranted.
Emerging challenges with the new enterprise WAN
As discussed in the report EMA Survey – WAN Transformation with SD-WAN: April 2023, 63% of companies have now shifted to using broadband as their primary WAN connectivity, stepping away from MPLS networks. This move increases the involvement of third-party providers, which complicates network management. The EMA report also indicates that 42% of companies lack end-to-end visibility into the network as network operations must go through networks they don’t own or control. This heightens the need for comprehensive end-to-end visibility.
AppNeta helps bridge this visibility gap by providing actionable insights that allow organizations to manage their VeloCloud SD-WAN deployments more efficiently. AppNeta ensures that the underlying paths are constantly monitored, while offering clarity when working with ISP networks or cloud service providers.
Maximize insights into VeloCloud SD-WAN deployments
AppNeta goes beyond the native capabilities of VeloCloud SD-WAN by providing visibility into all aspects of the network, especially where operations must go through external networks or third-party ISPs. Isolating the origin of problems helps reduce mean time to innocence(MTTI) and mean time to repair (MTTR) by helping teams quickly determine whether an issue is within their control or caused by external providers.
Achieve end-to-end visibility using VeloCloud SD-WAN and AppNeta by Broadcom
How does AppNeta provide hop-by-hop visibility?
AppNeta’s continuous path analysis allows for real-time diagnostics, periodically sending small bursts of data across network routes to detect bottlenecks or outages. This feature is valuable when monitoring overlay networks that rely on public broadband or multi-cloud connections, where issues are more likely to occur due to complex inter-network dependencies.
AppNeta’s TruPath technology helps answer vital questions such as which routes are experiencing slowdowns, the precise time of outages, and the capacity provided by ISPs. These insights are critical for effectively managing service-level agreements (SLAs) and minimizing downtime.
Validate overlay quality: AppNeta is designed to monitor a very large quantity of network paths with as low amount of overhead as possible. It enables you to see overall path quality and correlate overlay performance to underlay performance. The solution generates a continuous representation of a range of network behaviors over long periods of time, such as bandwidth, loss, jitter, and latency. In addition, AppNeta evaluates the MOS, which is a metric used to assess audio experience in communication networks. It quantifies user perception of call quality on a scale from 1 to 5, and provides a good understanding of the audio quality on the network.
Diagnose underlay issues: AppNeta provides actionable insight into how third-party networks affect overall performance in real-time. It actively monitors network paths such as ISPs, MPLS, and other WAN links, including all the network devices or “hops” the data passes through. The solution measures the time small bursts of packets take to go from a source to a target and back, the delay between packets on their return, the packet reordering, and the number of packets lost. These measurements enable the solution to detect network performance issues and identify the location of the problem using a hop-by-hop diagnostic.
Verify cloud connections: AppNeta features synthetic monitoring, a modern way to see trends in the performance of web and SaaS applications. It provides visibility across SASE/CASB, direct-to-Internet, and other links that do not cross VeloCloud tunnels by testing cloud based targets periodically to determine any response time degradation.
Business outcomes with VeloCloud and AppNeta
Integrating AppNeta with VeloCloud SD-WAN doesn’t just enhance operational efficiency—it also delivers significant business benefits. Together, these technologies provide the necessary visibility to reduce crisis management costs by up to 35% and reduce lost end-user working hours by 30%. Having end-to-end visibility helps network operations teams to quickly diagnose underlay issues, especially across unowned networks, reducing downtime and improving the overall user experience.
Key takeaways
While VeloCloud SD-WAN protects application experience from network impairments for users, Appneta provides network administrators insight into the root cause of the network impairments.
