AppNeta Overview
AppNeta, a product by Broadcom Software, is a comprehensive network and application performance monitoring solution designed to help IT and Network Operations teams ensure the continuous and exceptional delivery of business-critical applications.
Key Functionality
AppNeta provides end-to-end visibility into network and application performance, enabling teams to monitor, manage, and optimize their infrastructure regardless of the complexity of their environment.
Monitoring Mechanisms
AppNeta employs three distinct monitoring mechanisms:
- Delivery Monitoring: This involves lightweight continuous path analysis (CPA) to identify network problems. CPA sends small bursts of packets to user-determined targets and collects timing data to help pinpoint issues. It is particularly useful for monitoring network paths, including those outside of your direct control, such as third-party ISP and cloud networks.
- Experience Monitoring: This focuses on how users are experiencing application performance. It includes synthetic transaction monitoring to identify issues with SaaS and web applications before they affect users. This ensures proactive action can be taken to maintain optimal user experience.
- Usage Monitoring: This provides insights into how network bandwidth is being utilized per application and per user. It helps in understanding traffic patterns, identifying inefficient usage, and planning for capacity requirements.
Monitoring Points
AppNeta’s monitoring capabilities are enhanced through the use of various types of Monitoring Points:
- Enterprise Monitoring Points (EMPs): These are owned and managed by the user and can be deployed as hardware, containers, virtual machines, or software. EMPs are used for Delivery, Experience, and Usage monitoring and are placed in locations under the user’s control.
- Global Monitoring Points (GMPs): These are container-based Monitoring Points owned by the user but managed by AppNeta. GMPs are installed in global cloud provider locations to monitor networks and web applications from areas where users are located but where deploying an EMP might be impractical.
Key Features
Visibility and Insights
- AppNeta offers comprehensive visibility into application components and their interoperability, allowing users to identify inefficient commands and quickly resolve application problems.
- It provides quantifiable data and visibility into traffic monitoring, addressing blind spots and offering a realistic view of the true traffic within the environment.
Path Analysis and Synthetic Monitoring
- The solution includes a highly regarded path analysis feature, known as TruPath, which is a patented, low-overhead technology that enables monitoring visibility from the user perspective. This helps in investigating changes in the environment and identifying the causes of issues.
Security and Alerting
- AppNeta helps in detecting leading indicators of potential threats and enables timely responses to ensure security. It also reduces noise and suppresses redundant alerts, ensuring that only critical information is relayed to on-call resolvers.
Integration and Scalability
- AppNeta data can be integrated with other tools such as DX NetOps for enhanced aggregation, reporting, and dashboard capabilities. It also integrates with xMatters to automate workflows, send notifications, and drive incident response.
- The solution is highly scalable and multi-tenant, allowing for easy scaling within different sections of the organization to monitor multiple applications and monitoring points.
Deployment Options
AppNeta is available in two formats:
- SaaS: Deployed on the public cloud, offering a cloud-based solution.
- On-Prem: Deployed on the user’s own hardware, providing a software system that can be managed locally.
Primary Use Cases
AppNeta is primarily used for general network performance monitoring and testing, ensuring infrastructure performance, conducting load testing, evaluating latency tolerance, and checking connectivity and performance between different locations such as data centers, clouds, and retail campuses. It is also utilized for SD-WAN implementation, cloud migration, and evaluating application performance during SaaS adoption.