AppNeta by Broadcom Valuable Features

Cliff Chapman - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at Linkstatus Ltd

The main feature that we use is what they call Delivery, which is the testing of network paths end-to-end. They do provide synthetic web transactions, and they also provide the ability to actually look at traffic on the network, but we don't use web transactions very much. That's essentially because the customers we work with aren't interested in that side of the business. 

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

When you look in the layer 7 environment, you actually can see the code operating against the two parties. It could be a client server, a web server, or a database server. It could be a database server and another database server. You can look at whatever those application components are and you see how they're interoperating. If for some reason, there's a runaway command or something that's inefficient, you can see the command that's being executed and the players that it's operating against. I did that with the infrastructure team and the application development team, and we could very quickly remedy problems with the application that the organization was facing for an extended period of time, even before my project was initiated.

I've recently looked at their current offering and see that they can investigate Layer 7 network to see what commands are being written and passed or returned. That's quite useful. It will help identify latency and if it is related to the traffic or the code itself. That, in turn, helps people debug more quickly. We can rectify issues in days as opposed to months. 

I like that we have quantifiable data in order to get true measures. 

The solution provides more visibility into the monitoring of traffic. It helps address blind spots. It develops an intelligent fabric that gives you a more realistic view of the true traffic within the environment.

When it comes to the visibility into the infrastructure, it is imperative that the people applying these probes understand the reference architecture and understand their segmentation model. Sometimes if an organization has a compliance responsibility, then normally, the segmentation models are somewhat defined. If, for some reason, the organization is open and there aren't too many like that anymore, then there are no problems. You start to segment the incident and try to understand the relationship between these different assets and the environment, it might block traffic and you might not be able to see it. 

When you're dealing with Cisco fabric, if for some reason you have a host hanging off a distribution switch and another host hanging off a distribution switch based on the Cisco fabric, that traffic may never hit the core switch. Sometimes people analyze NetFlow off the core, but if something is operating through a distribution switch, you will never see that traffic when you're dealing with a Cisco fabric. I define that as a layer 2 blind spot.

In order for you to rectify that, you have to have probes in environments that travel through the course switch to see the full amount of traffic. Once you set up the fabric, that becomes one large network to your network environment, and they're not traffic tracking anything within it until it hits a port somewhere.

Alerting is becoming more critical over time. I've been in this business for a long time. Twenty years ago we'd be in a data center and we'd have a perimeter network and we'd be done. The bottom line would be very difficult for someone to come in and compromise my environment. Then we extended our environments from on-premise into co-location. Now we actually have traffic that goes over a wide area network. As such, our security profile changes over time. At first, we would normally do it through all layer 2 relationships or VPN-type environments, but now we're doing it over the internet. The instant we poke a hole through your internet, even though we have a tunnel within it, we're exposed to a higher-threat environment. 

Now that we're in the cloud, we're going through a higher-threat environment. Around two years ago there was an exploit that focused on the chip. So even if I'm using a cloud provider, I'm leveraging their hypervisor, and I have my own tenancy, at the end of the day everything runs through a processor. So when that processor exploit came through, around four years ago, that problem's wide open. At the end of the day, now more than ever, monitoring is important.

Somebody noticed a spike in traffic, somebody compromised the environment. It was a ransomware attack. Because of that leading indicator plus the consideration of the compute environment as well, they could shut down the attack but if they didn't have that capability, they would've been taken advantage of. Based on the ability to look for those leading indicators that can be fed back or introduced into your SIEM environment to make sure that you're responding to any threats that may occur, which are more prevalent now than ever before.

The user interface they have right now is very powerful. 

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

Delivery and experience are valuable. The usage in terms of the traffic application captures and other similar things is also valuable.

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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

The path analysis is most valuable. I really like the fact that it keeps all of the path analysis data. When something happens in the environment, it is helpful for taking a look at what changed. That's something that's different from other network monitoring or QoE tools that I've seen before.

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JB
Advanced Network Support at netagen

The solution has a few valuable features because it allows our company to install an actual hardware appliance in the customers' network. With AppNeta by Broadcom, you can do packet captures from it and also deal with the area of user experience. The tool also has the ability to set up phones and Power over Ethernet (PoE), so you can get some traces from the actual phones set towards the PBXs.

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

The usage feature is very good. It provides the users of applications, the details of who is using the network, and which application when there was a huge usage of bandwidth. We have 2,000-plus applications registered, including Netflix, Facebook, et cetera. So we can monitor the usage of anyone who is trying to access them and take necessary actions to make sure that the bandwidth is not over-utilized.

AppNeta also provides visibility into managed and unmanaged networks. For an end-user to do their daily work, they need to access either a SaaS or on-prem application, or maybe it is in a data center. If there is some issue with that application, they can't get their work done. The IT team can install software on the end-user's laptop to continuously monitor things and get complete visibility, from the end-user perspective, into where exactly the problem is.

In addition, we get complete, hop-by-hop visibility into the internet and we can know how much latency is taking place from one hop to another. That way, we know whether a particular hop belongs to the ISP, or that it is something owned by our own client's office, or is something to do with the SaaS network.

And we can do active synthetic monitoring of any application or of the network to get what the delivery and the experience are like. That definitely provides us with proactive monitoring where it keeps checking the network with respect to an application and with respect to network latencies. It can alert us about any abnormal activities based on thresholds that are configured.

We also monitor everything that is passing through a SPAN port, whatever is going to the core switch. We span everything out and then we put it into AppNeta. The application reads everything and knows who's using what and can give us details about that. This helps us know that the network is functioning properly and that it is not over-utilized in terms of bandwidth.

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

Probably the most valuable is that it doesn’t really require any or just a minimal amount of effort on my part to sustain its operations. What results from that is the time that I spend interacting with it is actually productive time, solving a problem or validating service or validating functionality across my network or knowing that connectivity exists. I don’t have to hold its hand all the time and babysit it and worry about this patch didn’t work or this upgrade didn’t work or now I've got to take it down to restart it and reboot it.

All that stuff is handled very effectively by the AppNeta team and that frees up my time to take care of the more valuable things.

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it_user568332 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer II at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Easy to set up and clear to understand interface.
  • Cloud based management means it is accessible from anywhere and great uptime.
  • The best feature this product has is its ability to diagnose and troubleshoot an issue with very close accuracy.
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it_user378480 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

From a technical perspective, PathView provides an effective, reliable indicator of network availability across our widely distributed physical locations. From a non-technical perspective AppNeta Customer Support remains continuously and positively engaged with us.

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

The ability to view into third party networks for visibility as to problem areas that are often outside the prevue of a standard network analysis tool. Also, the ability to utilize FlowView to capture and analyze packet flow from source and to destination has been a significant asset to our troubleshooting and remediation solutions.

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Purneswara Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at KyndleIT Consulting

The product helps us understand networks and user experience. It helps us to understand the issues. 

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

End-to-End video testing - we would deploy m22s into a client’s network where we plan to deploy a high end video endpoint. This allows us to ensure that the client's network is capable of handling the planned video traffic. We run it over 24 hours or 7 days so that we can see the effect of any other traffic on the network, such as nightly backups.

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

Packet Captures, Path Lists and Voice Tests. We are a VOIP company that relies on a stable and well-tested network. The AppNeta device has allowed us to troubleshoot and pinpoint where there are failures, bottlenecks and misstated service levels on numerous networks.

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

The tool allows us to ensure the capacity/bandwidth/packet loss of our VPN based WAN within our thresholds and this is done end-to-end. It is different from SNMP/Netflow based monitoring, which we also make use of.

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

The most valuable feature for us is its ability to provide quick visualizations of many aspects (front end, back end, software layers, etc.) of application performance in one place.

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

Pathview is the most valuable feature. It does the following:

  • Gives us details of how bandwidth is consumed
  • Gives details about the assigned bandwidth to the link and used bandwidth
  • Shows the events happening during the monitoring
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it_user375441 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features for us are the synthetic tests and automatic testing when an issue it detected. This gives you a more granular look to see what the issue is.

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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.