Sean Armstrong, VP of Products Despite cost-effectiveness, several companies hesitate to embrace the prevalent trend of hybrid cloud adoption as they are apprehensive about running the application outside their controlled environment. Moreover, the transition is always not smooth, and users of the application demand consistent or better performance. Yet, guaranteed network performance doesn’t make it to the list of information provided by a typical cloud provider. AppNeta, a SaaS-based service, and network performance platform offers information on the real-time performance of the cloud, ensuring that businesses make the right choice with regard to vendors. “AppNeta concurrently monitors a company's physical data centers and cloud-based deployments, which makes them capable of identifying and diagnosing issues and offer actionable information to resolve real time problems,” says Sean Armstrong, VP of Products at AppNeta.
The solution is particularly beneficial to companies that do not own a variety of IT infrastructure, as it provides complete visibility by continuously monitoring end-user experience across apps, network or the cloud. Even if the infrastructure of a SaaS application is performing well, the end user might still encounter glitches due to various factors like ISP network issues, or midpoint carriers. AppNeta monitors every aspect of the enterprise infrastructure, starting from the Wi-Fi, or LAN connection, over the internet and into the user’s account within that service, ensuring that the application functions optimally.
To operate its solution in a highly dynamic environment, AppNeta employs three different forms of instrumentation from physical, web-based, and software appliances. At the outset, the team conducts a usage analysis to determine the applications that are running, and the user running them. Based on the overall activity level, they determine if the user has a quality experience, or if there is any latency or data loss, recognizing the specific aspect the team should focus on to resolve the issue.
AppNeta concurrently monitors a company's physical data centers and cloud-based deployments, offering actionable information to resolve the problem
With the data garnered from the DPI analysis, the team then proceeds to active network instrumentation, which detects where this application is hosted and helps AppNeta provide information regarding what is achievable over the end-to-end network, total capacity, the highest point of congestion, and the quality of service being delivered. For web applications, AppNeta performs synthetic web transactions, where they record real user interaction. They log in to the application, perform a number of standard actions and repeat the process at a frequency desired by the customer, ensuring that the applications are accessible, the performance is optimum, and that the SLAs are being met.
Starting out with network diagnostics, AppNeta soon realized that to maximize the value of their offerings, they need to perform diagnostics continuously and frequently. In order to do so, the firm elevated their network visibility from layer 3 and 4 to layer 7 via a unique network monitoring technology, TruPath that is responsible for AppNeta’s ability to examine cloud providers’ networks and other SaaS applications. By detecting usage flow through DPI analysis, AppNeta can target TruPath analysis for critical applications, determining the end-to-end network path, and evaluate its performance.
The company is currently expanding into native cloud deployment options whereby the platform can reach out to numerous cloud vendors to assess the network between a VM and the service, evaluating the performance of the internal paths within the cloud. The team also intends to help enterprises shift from physical call centers to virtual ones, where employees can assist customers from their home. Further down the line, AppNeta seeks to optimize alerting intelligence, automating the fine-tuning of performance baselines.
