Full stack network monitoring and added synthetic insights validates pre–production and production software defined networking deployments.
The Challenge: Unpredictable Modern Network Architectures
Deploying new services based on cloud and software defined networking architectures comes with a new level of complexity for network operations, as well as network monitoring software. Cloud and SDN enables infrastructures to become agile enough to feed consumer demand for constant access to applications, data and bandwidth, but network monitoring needs to become just as agile to discover, visualize, identify, scale and predict to meet the constant rate of change within these dynamic architectures.
Additionally, service delivery on top of modern network infrastructures requires validation prior to and at the time of deployment via active testing of real–world traffic patterns, along with live monitoring across all the layers of the new software defined networking stack, identifying bottlenecks and validating service level agreements (SLAs), all while doing it from the end–user perspective.
The Solution: Active Testing and Live Monitoring for Predictive Network Behavior
Netrounds Active Testing, when used with Network Operations and Analytics from CA Technologies, offers a comprehensive and scalable real–time view of network behavior and end–to–end network service quality. The combined capabilities act as the umbrella full stack fault and performance monitoring system and monitors network, server and application performance using passive techniques. Netrounds adds active test results and continuous monitoring KPIs for network services to the overall network and service health picture. This award-winning combination of active service data and passive infrastructure performance monitoring is designed to create a comprehensive end–to–end view of network service quality from the end–users’ perspective, based on predictive network behavior as well as inventory, topology, faults, flow and packet analysis converted into actionable intelligence for network operations.
Example Use Case: SD–WAN and WAN monitoring
Test Agents generate active traffic to validate and monitor service KPIs between SD–WAN end points or distributed branch offices and can be easily deployed at each remote end point location to perform extensive, distributed measurements of end–user quality in real time. Upon quality degradations or SLA threshold violations for your monitored services, alarms will be triggered and alerts sent to the Network Operations and Analytics from CA to sectionalize the problem and understand the network layer and domain that the problem corresponds to.
Programmable test capabilities can also be used to automatically validate dynamic service changes. For example, in the case of a reroute event, Test Agents are instructed to execute a test that validates that the technical SLA is met with the new route.
Example Use Case: Cloud workload and service chain monitoring
In cloud environments, the vital network functions are deployed as a chain of VNFs in the data center. Monitoring of a service chain must be done in two layers:
- Passive monitoring of resources like CPU, memory and disk utilization. This is performed by Network Operations and Analytics from CA Technologies.
- Active testing and monitoring of the data plane functionality. Netrounds adds this capability to the CA solution.
Figure 2 illustrates a visualization example from the Network Operations and Analytics UI in which a service chain comprising of a virtual load balancer (vLB) and a vCache includes two Netrounds Virtual Test Agents (vTA VNFs), one at each end of the service chain. These Test Agents are critical at two different stages:
- During service turn–up, Test Agents perform a service activation test to verify that the service chain delivers the promised performance across the data plane.
- During ongoing operation, Test Agents continuously and actively monitor the functionality and performance of the service chain.
Predictive network behavior is a prerequisite for deploying and managing modern software defined network architectures. Before turning over services to your customers, you should have confidence in how your SDN and cloud networks will behave. When integrated with Netrounds Active Testing, Network Operations and Analytics from CA Technologies can validate the network behavior in automated software defined networking and hybrid cloud environments. Together with full stack network monitoring and added synthetic insights, these powerful integrated capabilities will only enhance operational analytics and intelligence with network teams to more consistently deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Check out why this integration between CA and Netrounds won the 2017 Networking Innovator Award from Enterprise Management Associates.
Going to Cisco Live US? CA Technologies will be showcasing their award winning Network Operations and Analytics for Cisco SDN architectures in booth #2030 at Cisco Live, Orlando June 10-14. Stop by the booth for solution demonstrations and huge giveaways!
