Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A constant challenge in business is aligning stakeholders, customers, and employees behind a single mission. Carefully crafted plans often fail spectacularly as a result of complexity. Some of these efforts fail slowly; some even before execution begins. Especially when collaboration is important, simplicity can make challenging work innately more understandable, measurable, and engaging.

With the advent of byte code instrumentation (BCI) in 2008, application performance management took a giant leap in what is known as "inside-out monitoring," that is, monitoring from inside the application. Before that, application monitoring was largely limited to tracking CPU, memory, disk, and process availability. BCI offered new opportunities in terms of how applications could be monitored and what could be monitored from an application performance perspective.

The move to software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) is happening rapidly, and on a large scale. However, many network operations teams are struggling to contend with the monitoring implications of these technologies. In this post, I’ll outline the visibility gaps posed by SD-WAN, and I’ll detail how DX NetOps by Broadcom addresses these gaps.

An organization’s success is ultimately defined by the decisions that get made. Whether it’s a CEO determining whether to make a strategic acquisition or an individual contributor choosing what to work on during a given day, decisions have consequences.

When an application breaks and we hear things like, “My login is not working,” or “The web app is slow,'' more often than not SiteMinderTM seems to be in the line of fire. However, in my experience, it has usually been a third-party or other configured item like firewall rules that have turned out to be the culprit. Now I am not saying that it is never SiteMinder. Potentially the issue could be anywhere, but I guess the bigger question here is how do we prove it one way or the other?

For network operations teams, having remote employees out of sight doesn’t mean they can be out of mind. This is particularly true for remote employees who directly support and interact with customers. In many industries today, organizations may have a significant percentage of employees working in some type of remote fashion, including those who deliver customer-facing services.

“It’s the network again.” That is what most people think of when they experience degradation in their digital interactions. Whether it’s an app that won’t load, a 404 error, or garbled speech in a streaming conversation—the network’s reputation always seems to take a hit when things go wrong. Battling this perception with facts is essential. This requires knowing what’s up, what’s down, and what’s affected.

For IT operations teams running modern networks, the work can be challenging and thankless. These teams don’t ever receive congratulatory messages from executives when a video conference operates flawlessly—they only hear complaints when those sessions are problematic.

Today, network operations teams encounter significant hurdles due to shortages of skilled personnel and fragmented toolsets. Despite consolidation efforts, it's common for teams to manage up to 15 different monitoring products. Research suggests that network professionals believe they could potentially resolve 53% of network issues by implementing improved network management tools.

For the fourth consecutive year, Broadcom has been named the highest-scoring leader and outperformer in the 2024 GigaOm Radar Report for Network Observability. In this latest report, GigaOm defines network observability as “a category of solutions that go beyond device-centric network monitoring to provide truly relevant end-to-end visibility and intelligence for all the traffic in your network, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or anywhere else.”