Broadcom Extends Reach of Network Monitoring Tool

Broadcom this week unveiled an update to its network monitoring tool that addresses the need to manage networking at scale at a time when application use cases have become more distributed.

The shift to working from home and accessing applications in the cloud coupled with the rise of edge computing platforms and microservices-based applications that are being deployed across an extended enterprise is increasing the dependency organizations have on network connectivity, says Sudip Datta, general manager and head of AIOps, observability and automation at Broadcom. “There’s now a huge reliance on connectivity,” he says.

The latest version of DX NetOps network monitoring software from Broadcom addresses those requirements by expanding its ability to support more than 500,000 hyper-scale devices alongside more than 300,000 software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) tunnels. In addition, DX NetOps now supports VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud. Nokia Nuage software-defined data center, and Cisco Meraki Cloud-Managed LAN and Wi-Fi platforms.

IT teams can also now take advantage of Syslog events/alarms to isolate network faults and improve meantime to recovery, in addition to accessing real-time insights into network performance and automatically generating reports that identify network configuration policy violations. Broadcom has also further centralized security configuration and administration in addition to streamlining the number of alerts that might be generated by network events.

SD-WAN Use Grows with Remote Work

Network management has become a lot more challenging since the COVID-19 pandemic for a wide variety of reasons. More organizations have embraced SD-WANs to provide access to home offices that, from a networking management perspective, represent a massive increase in the number of remote offices requiring connectivity. More end users than ever are also accessing cloud applications over a variety of wide area networks (WANs) 

At the same time, organizations are deploying a new generation of distributed applications based on microservices that tend to be latency sensitive. As such, disruptions to network services can more easily adversely impact application performance.

Finally, edge computing platforms that are being deployed closer to the point where data is being created and consumed also require network access.

Also read: Work-From-Anywhere Shift Will Increase IT Costs

Network Challenges Hamper Efficiency

Unfortunately, networking is often taken for granted until organizations start to realize that, not only are many of the legacy switches and routers they have in place not able to keep pace with demands for bandwidth, they also lack the tools required to manage an underlying network that is becoming more fragmented by the day. Network operations teams, for example, require a tool that enables them to more efficiently manage both network flows and overall performance, says Datta. Today many networking teams are required to navigate multiple tools to achieve that goal, he adds.

Each organization will encounter more complex networking challenges at varying rates. However, with many employees continuing to work from home well into 2022 it’s now more a question of when rather than if IT teams will have to revisit network management across the enterprise. In the absence of that effort, however, the reason why one application experience is so different from another is likely to remain a mystery. 

Read next: Networking’s Future is in the Distributed Cloud