AppNeta by Broadcom Benefits

Cliff Chapman - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at Linkstatus Ltd

It works well for visibility into the internet and cloud environments. AppNeta works from a source probe, and it sends a low bandwidth stream of traffic to a target. If the target is not another probe, it has to use ICMP. One slight difficulty is that a lot of the cloud vendors don't allow ICMP into their cloud infrastructure. The way around that is to install a software probe in the cloud. So, AppNeta has installed software probes in nearly every Microsoft Azure location, and those probes are publicly accessible, which means we can reach them by using a different protocol. If we need to test somewhere that's not Azure, such as Amazon Web Services or Google, then we would need to install a software probe in the cloud. So, it's one more step than we've had to use in the past, but that's because of what cloud providers will allow and will not allow into their data centers.

In terms of active and passive monitoring for alerting us to the deterioration of digital experiences before users are impacted, the delivery side is always active because that's the way it works. The passive side is used to monitor the operational traffic that's on the network. It works fine, but we don't use it very much because there are always security implications. So, we only use the active side of the tool. The passive side looks at the operational traffic that's already on the network, which can become tricky security-wise because when you do that, you are able to see all of the traffic unless it's encrypted. We don't tend to use that. We have used it, and it's useful to work out notifications and alerting. From the active side, we can see if the utilization is high, but we can't tell what's causing the high utilization. If we can get security authorization, we can use the passive side to find out which applications are using all the bandwidth. Typically, we're mostly focused on the active side of the testing, and the alerting and the notifications are very useful.

We use the Automatic User Geo-Location feature. It happens automatically. It's not something that you can turn on or off. We do use it, but I'm always a little concerned about how accurate it might be. That has nothing to do with AppNeta. For example, if I try to find out where my home broadband is, quite often, it'll show me in London, whereas actually, I live 80 miles away from London. It's just where the IP address is logged. We do use it, but we use it cautiously. It's good for the remote workforce. We've done a lot of troubleshooting work for people working from home. Over the last couple of years, so many people have started working from home, and they've had to rely on commercial broadband rather than business broadband. Often, people have no experience in networking or troubleshooting. We're able to get them a software agent that can be installed on their machine, and then once it's on, we just remotely manage it from a central location. So, once a user has installed the probe, which is no more difficult than any other Windows or Mac application, they don't have to do anything else. We take it over from there. When AppNeta first brought the licensing out for working-from-home pros, it included 25 agents, and recently, they pulled that up to 50 agents. It's pretty useful. For the price of one standard license, you get 50 agents that you can either put in for people working from home, or you can put them in a branch office as if it was a hardware probe. We found it to be very flexible for that purpose.

In terms of ease of using the Automatic User Geo-Location feature to determine if a problem is user-specific or region-specific, it depends on how many agents are around. We do know what the ISP is because it automatically tells us the ISP, as well as the geolocation. If we see people in similar locations and they're having problems with the same ISP, we can pin that down to an ISP problem. It's a question of comparing and contrasting what all the users are doing, but the end-to-end thing is, AppNeta already has a system to work out where a problem might be, whether it's at the local end with the user, or at the remote destination end, or somewhere in between. It always has that ability. There's a combination of ways to find out where a problem might be getting caused and who's causing it and why.

It's very good for our Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) for performance issues across business-critical apps, locations, and users. Obviously, when you're dealing with an end-to-end path, the devices and the connections are not all owned by the same people. The local part of the network is owned by the customer or a third party. There may be one or more ISPs, and there might be an ISP at the local end and a different ISP at the remote end because we work globally. So, we may be testing between the US and the Far East, or with the UK and South Africa. There's always at least one telco, and normally, more than one telco. Although we can pinpoint the problem and find out who owns it, it doesn't mean we can fix it fast because it all depends on other third parties accepting what we say and getting on and fixing it for themselves. However, normally, if there's a problem that lasts more than, for example, 10 minutes, we pretty much know exactly where the problem is.

It hasn't had much effect on our mean time to resolve (MTTR) because we're not normally in a position to resolve it. We're all pretty much external consultants. We can explain to people where the problem is, but we don't have direct relationships with telcos, where we can instruct them to go and do this. The MTTR for a problem is a bit unpredictable, but that doesn't have anything to do with AppNeta. That has to do with convincing the person or the organization that owns the problem area to get on and fix it.

We have seen a reduction in open tickets using AppNeta. Before people used AppNeta, they didn't have a reliable method to find out where the problem was. Sometimes, when we work for a particular client, a problem ticket has been open for a month because the problem is periodic, and it is unpredictable when it happens. When it does happen, they don't have the right tool in place to monitor it, and then we come in and install AppNeta, and generally, we can get that ticket closed within a few days of us becoming involved. So, we often find that problem tickets have been open and unresolved for quite some time, and then we come in and put AppNeta in, and typically, we can get that ticket closed within a few days. It's just a matter of how quickly the people involve us in the problem. If we were involved right from the beginning, I'm pretty confident that it would definitely result in tickets getting closed earlier. Sometimes, tickets are getting closed within minutes because we've done our bit and we've said what the problem is and where the problem is. There's not really any point in holding the ticket open any longer because the resolution is up to some other third party like ISP or telco.

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Out West - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager and IT Management Consultant at a integrator with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution has allowed us to establish a baseline that is quantifiable. When you take the load and move it to another location, this solution is going to tell you exactly what's happening on an infrastructure level. This way, you don't have to focus on the infrastructure and can focus instead on the code itself and the application performance.

This solution helps prove that if we move to the cloud, we'll still be as effective as we are on-premises.  

It's proving the infrastructure, but more importantly, it offers the ability to discuss multidisciplinary issues with the health of the environment that goes up from the infrastructure and up through our transport layer into our presentation layer. A lot of times the individuals will have very narrow perspectives based on their role in our organization. This helps bridge the gap in communications through reporting and facts that we can sit down and look at.

When I actually take the load and I start moving it around then I see a reduction in opening tickets by 70-80%. I normally am the one who recommends it, and I introduce it to give myself a fighting chance to make sure we minimize the impact on operations.

It's critical because people don't spend a lot of lost time. It gets them focused, and the meantime to resolution is decreased. There are also fewer tickets open because we actually understand where the problem lies. It provides visibility to that.

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Mohan Rawat - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer II at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Its benefits have been in terms of alerting and monitoring. That's pretty much what this tool is supposed to do, and that's what it's doing.

It's pretty good in terms of visibility. It has been pretty helpful. A couple of times when users were complaining about the issues, I was able to find or share the facts and say, "It's not the network. It's something else above in the food chain." That's where it was a lot helpful.

We use active monitoring but not to the level that I want to. We are still in a transformation phase, but passive monitoring works the way it should. It's pretty straightforward. Whenever someone complains, we pretty much go into the tool and get the stats about what is there and whether it's something in the network or something up in the food chain.

It has drastically decreased the Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) for performance issues across business-critical apps, locations, and users. We didn't have a similar tool before. This is the first tool that we got. We found it and did the PoC. It has decreased our MTTI and saved 1-2 hours that our engineer used to spend checking multiple locations for any issues. The time taken to isolate a performance issue varies. If AppNeta is able to catch that right away, then it's quick. If it doesn't and if it's something that's way beyond AppNeta, it takes some time.

There are also time savings when it comes to Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) for performance issues. AppNeta is not doing any changes to our network. So, the first thing is to find the issue, and once we find it, we can roll back or do whatever we do to fix the problem. In terms of the reduction in open tickets using AppNeta, there hasn't been any reduction because it's not doing any type of fixing of the network. It has only helped us to decrease the MTTR because we now know where to look.

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Buyer's Guide
AppNeta by Broadcom
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about AppNeta by Broadcom. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Bernie DiPasquale - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager Global Networks / Infrastructure Architect at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has helped us to see issues or problems rather than having a customer report them.

A lot of times one of the AppNeta transactions showed that there is an issue, whereas everything seemed to be working properly. Once we dug into it, we realized that it really was highlighting a problem that otherwise we would not have seen. The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is to always trust the tool.

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JB
Advanced Network Support at netagen

In our company, the tool helps us get to where we think an issue is occurring, and we also can improve the network setup correctly for our customers with Q-SYS and similar settings.

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PP
Sr Technical/Presales Consultant at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

It helps when it comes to monitoring ISPs or SLAs undertaken by SaaS providers, to make sure that they are meeting the SLAs they have promised. IT engineers who are sitting in our office do not have access to what is happening with SaaS and cloud applications. So when a user is having issues with such an application, he will contact the internal IT team. Without AppNeta, the IT engineer cannot be sure where, exactly, the problem is because he has no access to or visibility into the network outside the office. Having AppNeta can provide a clear picture of where the problem is and the engineer can use it as proof to show the ISP or the SaaS application provider if the problem is on their side.

Before a user encounters an issue, we have the points that are being actively monitored and we are alerted from different locations. With AppNeta in place, we can check whether the issue is in one branch office or location or it is in different locations. It might be a problem on the application side. AppNeta helps us identify exactly where the problem is.

Generally, an end-user will not open a ticket the moment they see a problem. They will wait for maybe five or 10 minutes. Only once they feel that, yes, there is an issue, will they open a ticket. With the active monitoring in place, we know that there is a problem because the monitors keep checking the network every minute. Before the user experiences it and opens a ticket, we are aware of the problem and are going to fix it. When the IT team is aware of a problem that affects most users, the number of tickets is definitely going to be reduced because they know where a problem is and are fixing it before other people experience it. With AppNeta, we have seen a reduction in tickets of 15-plus percent.

In terms of MTTR, once you have identified an issue, the resolution time will depend on how quickly the engineer can resolve it. Monitoring solutions are only there to pinpoint where exactly the problem is. After that, it's the IT team that has to take care of it, whether they have to contact the respective SD-WAN vendor or SaaS provider or ISP. AppNeta reduces our MTTR for sure.

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it_user378480 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is much easier and it gives a very, very apples-to-apples view that becomes available to a wider range of people, including support . It is very easy for everyone to be able to see the same results or the same thing. There is no worrying about trying to interpret what the results mean. It just quickly gives us a very consistent, common, and easily viewable set of results.

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it_user568332 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer II at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The ability to quickly diagnose issues with proof for a "path" in the network has been critical. It has reduced our MTTR and allows us to make decisions faster on how to correct the problem.

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it_user378480 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

PathView provides immediate unequivocal confirmation of service restoration during situations that involve planned or unplanned loss of network connectivity.

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it_user536127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director of IT Engineering Delivery at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

We now use this tool as a pre-deployment asset for our hosted phone solution. We also use it for bring-your-own-broadband solutions for our hosted phone platform in order to validate our solution and the third party networks that it is transporting over. This has greatly improved customer satisfaction and reduced troubleshooting time. We also provide a managed service designed around this appliance and solution set.

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it_user535158 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global IT Manager at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

We run 24 hour or 7 day video based network path assessments to ensure our customers networks are ready for video systems.

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it_user571896 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Operations Manager \ Senior VOIP Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees

It has been a help to our company and customers.

With one of our federal customers, we deployed these throughout their network and found multiple cases of misconfigured routers and NICs, which allowed the customer to move to a VOIP solution.

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it_user535152 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Networking at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

For example, the tool helped in identifying unreliable ISPs or intermittent instability on WAN/VPN connections – both real time and based on historical metrics.

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it_user381825 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Adminstrator with 1,001-5,000 employees

Since we implemented it, we've seen multiple performance improvements, which in turn results in increases in revenue and efficiency.

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it_user572610 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer 2 with 501-1,000 employees

We can keep track of bandwidth utilization and data loss.

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it_user375441 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The appliances (M30’s) are constantly doing site-to tests. PathView has detected many circuit issues for which we could go back to the carrier and ask them to troubleshoot. It also shows us QoS marking that helps us audit and verify our QoS policies are set up correctly.

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Buyer's Guide
AppNeta by Broadcom
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about AppNeta by Broadcom. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.