Archive of posts with tag 'network performance monitoring'

While the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is more of a spectacle catered to, well, consumers than enterprises, the innovations and concepts unveiled on the floor every year offer something of a crystal ball for the entire tech landscape – including enterprise IT. For instance, the prospect of 5G and technologies that will (finally) help bring the...

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In an industry where acronyms and initialisms are a dime a dozen, few tech terms are as ubiquitous in the world of enterprise networking as MPLS and SD-WAN. Sure, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and UCaaS represent buzzworthy new workflows that have changed how enterprise IT teams are managing their tech footprints. But when it comes to the underlying networks that support...

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As 2019 comes to a close, 66 percent of companies embraced remote work, and for good reason: When businesses don’t have to gather all of their staff at HQ every day, bosses can broaden their search for talent beyond who is available locally, while giving employees more control of where and when they work, which has been proven to pay...

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At this rate, the term ‘transformation’ may feel a little tired in the context of enterprise IT and networking, as industry forecasts have been anticipating transformative changes to networking operations for the better part of the last decade. But there are a number of truly transformational initiatives gaining steam across the enterprise space that will be a top priority for...

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Last week, the AppNeta team took to Las Vegas for the 2020 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies (IOCS) Conference, where leaders and learners across the tech landscape converged to discuss where things stand today and get a sense of the future of enterprise networking. As expected, the many flavors of network “transformation” underway across the enterprise space was...

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From the onslaught of SaaS, to the widespread adoption of cloud, to leveraging the Internet to connect stakeholders across the WAN, there are no lack of special projects that IT has to manage at any given time. In the midst of steering transformations like SD-WAN and DIA adoption, teams need to also execute on their day-to-day marching orders of ensuring...

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With AWS re:Invent taking place in Las Vegas this week, ‘cloud’ and all of its associated buzzwords will be the talk of the tech industry (not to say that cloud is ever that far from the tech headlines). That’s because event host Amazon is set to unveil a bevy of new products that are aimed squarely at making cloud migration...

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Just like our enterprise clients, we leverage AppNeta Performance Manager internally to monitor our private cloud deployment, giving our corporate IT team the visibility they need to get to the bottom of issues impacting our own network environments. Recently, our Director of IT, Jason Hislop, was able to leverage our solution to identify an instance of jitter that had the...

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As heated as the “streaming wars” already were between cable-killing pioneers like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, a pair of new streamers are making a late entrance into the fray, backed by billions of investment dollars and some of the largest brand recognition of this or any industry. Disney+ and Apple TV+ both launched over the past two weeks, following what...

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Vendors and service providers frequently tout their products as “carrier-grade.” But what does this label actually entail, and is there a specific criteria a tool must meet to earn the title? For starters, there is no official designation or industry standard (ala MEF) for what makes a product or service “carrier-grade.” There is, however, a general consensus among leaders in...

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Ensuring that enterprise IT teams have comprehensive visibility across their app and network landscape has never been more critical. After all, enterprise network footprints are rapidly decentralizing as a wealth of cloud and SaaS solutions make the ability to support a distributed workforce possible. But most enterprise IT teams remain centralized and require cloud and SaaS tools of their own...

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At 10:30 PM on October 29, 1969, UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock and his student Charley Kline established an ARPANET link – the first one ever – between their campus and the office of Bill Duval, a programmer at Stanford University. And thus, the seeds of what would become the Internet we know today were planted. And 50 years later, the...

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As with seemingly everything in the retail sector these days, Amazon tends to lead the pack in bringing innovative solutions to its customers and workers. This includes launching a recent telehealth pilot, Amazon Care, designed to better serve employees who otherwise may not have easy access to many standard health services. Now Walmart, the number two e-commerce giant, is following...

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While SD-WAN has been trending in the enterprise IT space for a few years now, there’s been little official consensus on what these solutions should encompass, let alone what defines a “best-of-breed” SD-WAN. Sure, the label SD-WAN has been marketed publicly by many providers, but in lieu of a standard that defines what exactly these tools should deliver, customers may...

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According to a recent survey that looked at the number of devices students are using to access the Internet on campus, 61 percent of students are using tablets, 27 percent are using smartwatches and 25 percent are using gaming consoles – all on top of the laptops used by virtually every member of the campus community, not to mention the...

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With internet connectivity playing such a pivotal role in business, enterprises can’t afford to accept less-than-stellar performance from the ISPs they partner with. Doing so would set the whole business up for failure – and could paint enterprise IT in a bad light when they might not be at fault for poor performance, despite what the users they support might...

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For the largest enterprise networks, IT has historically had limited options when it came to monitoring their highest-capacity links (think network connections that scale up to 25, 40, 50 or even 100 Gbps speeds). While just a decade ago, teams may have hardly imagined a world where connectivity between data centers, large campuses, or across the entire WAN backbone would...

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Enterprise networks are getting faster and more efficient by the day. But while technology seems to evolve and advance at a breakneck pace these days, the humans in charge of managing new tech aren’t always able to keep up. That’s one of the main takeaways of a recent report from the Uptime Institute, which surveyed thousands of IT pros and...

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The rate of technological change where enterprise networking is concerned seems to accelerate at an ever-faster pace with each passing year. Just a half decade ago, for instance, “cloud-first” (or “Internet-first”) networking – that is, when a business begins leveraging network connectivity that prioritizes cloud and “direct-to-internet” workflows over legacy, hardware-defined networking tech – was still an emerging trend. Now,...

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Aside from being a perfect example of successful digital synchronization across multiple remote stakeholders, telehealth initiatives have been having a powerful impact on the humans they serve, from delivering real-time medical treatment in the midst of a natural disaster to treating distressed students on their terms. Now, one of the largest companies in the world is exploring telehealth to help...

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Lately, we’ve been on a roll with delivering platform updates that help successfully position our enterprise customers for a future where their WAN footprint will be more expansive and decentralized than ever before. From a slew of forward-looking DNS enhancements to completing our SOC 2 Type 2 certification, we’ve been proactive in adding features that give AppNeta customers a similarly...

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As network connectivity becomes increasingly critical to business success in the modern enterprise, ensuring IT and network operations teams have proactive visibility into network performance is essential. Yet a recent survey found that fewer than half of network performance degradations today are discovered by IT before they reach employees or, even worse, customers. According to the survey of 400 end...

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Earlier this summer, we unpacked the findings of Accenture’s “Perspective on Cloud Outcomes: Expectation vs. Reality” report, which found that of 200 IT pros polled, hardly one third are satisfied with the results of their cloud migration to date. Now, another report from Accenture is driving the point home that as a new generation of business solutions – namely, cloud...

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Another week, another round of mixed-messages for the retail sector, as a string of recent news continues to paint a fuzzy picture for the future of the industry as it reckons with digital transformation. First up was a report from Best Buy that delivered about as mixed a message as market watchers could imagine. While the brand’s latest earnings report,...

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From funky new approaches to interior design to “thinking green” about plastic toiletries, many established hotel brands are going to great lengths to appeal to a new generation of travelers who put “experiences” (read: Instagrammable moments) ahead of material when it comes to spending. But the biggest and most impactful changes that hotel brands are instituting lately go beyond edgy...

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We recently discussed how educators in Florida are spearheading a revolutionary telehealth initiative to connect students living with the trauma of last year’s Hurricane Michael – the first Category 5 storm to make landfall in almost three decades – with mental health professionals in schools. But as the southeastern US reckons with the fallout of another monster storm in the...

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According to recent data from analyst firm Atos, banks can increase their operating profits by 30 percent through 2020 by embracing more digital workflows. In particular, hybrid cloud is proving to be the preferred avenue for digital transformation in the finance world, as hybrid helps level the playing field between traditional banks and a slew of digital disruptors. When discussing...

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“Come to AppNeta; have a baby!” is a frequent half-joke that gets told whenever we’re onboarding new team members. The reason for the comedy is that often when we tell prospective AppNetians about our flexible PTO and sick leave policies, plus our flexible parental leave, it’s almost comically hard to believe: Perks like these are just not common at most...

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A decade back, before cell phones became “smart” and armed almost every man, woman and child with a full-fledged, pocket-sized PC, network management teams were able to set and enforce fairly predictable use policies for employee devices. After all, it was (and remains) common for IT to supply computers to employees, while intelligent mobile devices (usually Blackberries, which were hardly...

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The start of the school year can be daunting under any circumstances. But for students in Northwest Florida, this fall marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Michael, one of the most damaging hurricanes on record and the first Category 5 to reach the U.S. mainland since 1992. For many in this corner of the state, memories of the Michael are...

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Whenever anyone is thinking about taking a job with a new company, work-life balance or harmony is certainly a consideration. Depending on where you are in your life’s journey, this consideration can mean different things, and how much it factors into your decision can vary. As a father of three when I joined AppNeta, and now a father of four,...

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According to a survey of Netflix subscribers conducted back in the summer of 2017, almost 40 percent of respondents admitted to streaming from the platform while on the job. Two years later, streaming in general has never been more popular, and a rash of Netflix competitors are about to launch, flooding workers with distracting content they can binge on the...

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We’ve quietly been releasing more features for DNS monitoring in AppNeta Performance Manager and it’s about time we talked about all of them in one place. Survival of the fastest DNS is built around the fastest responses, but AppNeta allows you to monitor every server and every response to ensure that a single quick response is not masking deeper issues...

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Any major network – especially a highly distributed one – that fails to change with the times is bound to pay a price. And while concepts like digital transformation are generally applied to industry verticals in the quest for greater business outcomes (and ultimately profits), the same principles can be applied to the sphere of education as a means to...

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We’ve said it before and we’ll keep on saying it: Undertaking any changes–big or small–to your network without having a data-driven strategy is a recipe for failure. But the message to date seems to be falling on deaf ears at many mature finance and telecom companies, as fewer than 35 percent of the IT leaders in this sector rely on...

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In Boston and other coastal tech hubs, the booming startup culture has been a boon when it comes to amping up the economy and attracting new residents, but something of a burden where factors like traffic and mass transit are concerned. As a result, leaders in Massachusetts have come up with a potential solution to some of their traffic woes:...

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Consumers are well aware of how connected technologies are speeding up the delivery of goods and services, enabling new and diverse methods for communication and even breaking down the geographical barriers to where and how they work. But when it comes to the production of those goods consumers can order with just a few taps on their smartphone (and even...

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Think remote work is just a passing fad? Take a look at the businesses popping up in support of the concept, and you might be convinced otherwise. Take, for example, Pizzatime, a new service from digital agency Planetary that organizes virtual pizza parties for teams collaborating from multiple branch locations. Leveraging Slack, the tool takes orders from each team member...

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Every sector faces unique roadblocks on their path to the cloud. In life sciences, however, the stakes of executing a successful digital transformation can literally be life or death, and protecting patients and their data has always been a top concern when adopting new technology. In that same vein, however, a reluctance to innovate or deploy technologies that can speed...

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According to a recent Salesforce report, 71 percent of enterprise IT teams are transforming from “a technology-providing cost center to a value-based service brokerage.” What does that mean exactly? For starters, the IT department of the past was very much a reactionary operation. That’s not to say that IT teams were always playing catch up, but actually the opposite: The...

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According to the latest figures from the Commerce Department, online shopping has overtaken grocery stores and restaurants in terms of retail market share to become the second largest category in this sector, trailing only vehicle and auto parts sales in the United States as of this June. As to be expected, a great deal of the surge in popularity for...

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Since the earliest days of Silicon Valley, competing tech companies have always been engaged in a virtual arms race for loyal users. Whether it’s PC versus Mac, or AWS versus Azure, there always seem to be at least two dueling behemoths involved whenever a new technology takes the scene. As we’ve covered in recent posts, communication software seems to be...

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Jealous that you’re missing out on the watercooler chatter surrounding Season 3 of Stranger Things? A new Chrome extension aims to have you covered. Netflix Hangouts is the latest in a long line of programs designed to help workers leverage their office networks for less-than-business-critical activities. The program creates what looks like a standard four-person video conference -- a communication...

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We’ve recently touched upon how digital transformation has been making a serious impact across industries, from the previously cloud-averse financial sector down to the assembly line. Retail, however, is one industry that’s perhaps felt the burn (and the boon, ie. Amazon, WalMart, Wayfair) of digital transformation more than any other. But while retailers have been credited with evolving in response...

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Between The Master’s and The Women’s World Cup, sports fans have had a lot of mid-day distractions lately. And while it’s not a sport in the traditional sense, the impending Democratic presidential debates present yet another heated competition that is likely to have many office workers switching back-and-forth between live streams over the coming months. Mixing work and politics is...

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When it comes to working in tech, being in the “right zipcode” is no longer the barrier to entry that it was in years past, a report from CompTIA suggests. In the company’s Tech on the Move survey, 78 percent of tech workers polled would consider leaving their current city for a new tech job, with affordability (60 percent) and...

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A recent Accenture survey of enterprise tech pros found that only one third of companies that have undergone cloud migration are reaping the expected results. The report, which received feedback from roughly 200 IT pros, emphasizes a “tale as old as time” about adopting any kind of new technology or workflow: Expectations can quickly get inflated when they aren’t rooted...

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Days 2 and 3 at Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego were jam-packed with activity for the AppNeta team. Look no further than Senior Sales Director Mike Mattei’s viral picture from the show floor for proof: Check out Mike Mattei breaking a sweat at #CLUS 2019 in San Diego! Come visit Mike and the rest of the AppNeta team at...

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The opening keynote from Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins started by pointing out that this was the company’s 30th year hosting a version Cisco Live, emphasizing just how much has changed in the tech world since the conference was born in 1989 as “Networkers.” (Shoutout to our intern @JarrettLee828 for leveraging that bit of knowledge for a prize during the show)...

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Google recently published an eye-opening report that looked at the impact of remote work on large organizations, a topic the behemoth search engine-cum-tech monolith is well suited to explore. After all, according to the company, at least 30 percent of all meetings held between employees involve at least two time zones. That makes sense when you consider that 2 in...

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According to the findings of our 2019 State of Enterprise IT report, only 53.5% of all enterprises are knowingly employing a network performance monitoring solution. That means that despite the fact that enterprises the world over are, by and large, overhauling their legacy networks to embrace enterprise decentralization, only about half of IT teams are even sure they have a...

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When the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went live a year ago, companies across the globe were bracing for the sky to fall. And while there were certainly some headline-grabbing fines for noncompliance (most notably, Google’s almost 50 million Euro hit this past January related to “forced consent”), the mandate’s first year was far less “doom and gloom”...

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According to a recent report from Gartner, anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of enterprise app spending takes place “in the shadows” -- that is, without the knowledge of enterprise IT, and potentially in violation of network policies. Known as “Shadow IT,” the rogue use of apps that leverage WAN capacity has exploded alongside the widespread adoption of SaaS for...

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The financial sector has been notoriously averse to embracing the scale of digital transformation that has transformed other industries from the top-down (think Industry 4.0, IoT in Healthcare, virtual dressing rooms, etc.). While banks of all sizes have adopted cloud computing for non-core functions, many still rely on legacy, hardware-defined workflows when it comes to business-critical operations and customer transactions....

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Fostering a happy and effective work culture isn’t about following fads. In the 8-plus years since AppNeta was founded, tech companies like ours have been known to deploy lots of gimmicks to attract the best talent, which may be a flashy-enough sell to get interested workers through the door, but not enough to build a team for the long haul....

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Last week, the AppNeta team traveled down to Dallas for ONUG Spring 2019, where we met with other leaders in the enterprise networking space to discuss the challenges and solutions organizations face as they put connected technologies front-and-center. The agenda for the event zeroed in on Digital Transformation in particular, which, as a concept, can be loaded. As we’ve discussed...

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Remote work is by no means a new concept, but recent high-profile announcements suggest that this model is fast graduating from “a novel approach” to an operational standard across industries. At Facebook’s recent F8 2019 developer conference, for instance, Stripe, a tech platform that builds economic infrastructure for web companies, announced that the company would be opening up a fifth...

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While consensus over what digital transformation actually means still appears to elude many members of the C-Suite, enterprise investment into the concept has never been higher, according to a recent report from IDC. Across virtually every industry and sector, total spending on digital transformation will jump roughly 18 percent in 2019 to a new high-water mark of $1.18 trillion. Gearing...

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Network monitoring solutions, by design, should help bring clarity into your management stack. Armed with this clarity, your team can start taking rote tasks out of your day-to-day to help streamline network management from the ground up. Every convenience we can provide -- no matter the scale -- to help speed up deployment or make AppNeta Performance Manager easier to...

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The 2019 State of IT Report from Spiceworks is out, and, as we could’ve predicted, upgrading outdated network infrastructure is the leading enterprise IT investment for the next year among leaders surveyed. Eighty-nine percent of those polled (which included IT execs across North America and Europe) expect their IT budgets to grow over the next 12 months. Stateside, many leaders...

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Cloud-based call centers have gone from risky experiments to a business standard over the course of the last decade. According to research from IDG, 62.4 percent of global enterprises now use cloud (or virtual) contact centers to facilitate their customer service and outreach operations, and for good reason. For starters, this reflects an overall trend of enterprise decentralization, where companies...

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In an age when “appointment television” is a nearly-dead concept (outside of Game of Thrones at least), people still go out of their way to make sure they catch their favorite team or player live. We’ve seen it firsthand here at AppNeta. Take the latest Masters Tournament: Ahead of Tiger Woods taking home his first title trophy in over a...

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What is digital transformation, exactly? If you ask senior enterprise leaders who took part in a recent report from CompleteSpectrum, you’ll be hard pressed to get a straight answer. According to the study, which polled 300 members of leadership teams at companies with between $15 million and $200 million in annual revenue, 94 percent said that digital transformation was a...

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According to the Cloud Adoption and Risk Report 2019 from McAfee, cloud usage grew 15 percent last year, establishing a new high-water mark for enterprise adoption. The average enterprise now employs roughly 1,935 cloud apps, with business applications (ie. Google Drive, Office 365 or Salesforce) accounting for 70 percent of total cloud services. (This may seem high, but McAfee likely...

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Last week, the AppNeta team took to the Great White North to host an industry luncheon and panel in Toronto, looking at the challenges of network management as cloud takes on a bigger role in the enterprise space. Moderated by our own Chief Customer Officer Adam Edwards, the panel also included John Menezes, President & CEO of Stratejm, Alfred Ng,...

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Buckle up, IT pros, and move over SDN: Intent-based networking (IBN) is the latest approach to network management that’s buzzing in the enterprise space. While this acronym may not be as familiar as others that have come to define IT ops and digital transformation (think SD-WAN and SaaS), it’s not actually an entirely new approach. In fact, IBN shares a...

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For years, the center of gravity within the tech sector has been squarely located in Silicon Valley, the storied West Coast home of Apple, Alphabet, and pretty much every other tech behemoth you can imagine (with a few notable exceptions like Amazon). As a result, tech workers have notoriously fled competing job markets in the hopes of landing gigs in...

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When monitoring an enterprise network, teams often think that they need to focus squarely on the apps that are deemed “business critical,” and little else. While the logic here isn’t flawed, per se, this approach robs IT of the holistic picture of network conditions they need to truly understand where their network capacity is being spent. Without this full picture...

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A new report from EMA, a leading IT and data management research group, found that roughly 75 percent of network managers polled think their network performance monitoring (NPM) tools are “insufficient” when it comes to the public cloud. Barely a quarter of those polled believe the tools they currently use fully address their monitoring needs where cloud monitoring is concerned,...

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IPv4, the previous and still prevalent generation of the Internet Protocol, was designed to support roughly 4.3 billion devices. While this was plenty of capacity for the connected world of 1980, it’s tiny by 2019 standards. While it’s not yet true that every one of the planet’s 7 billion people is armed with their own connected devices, it’s increasingly true...

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The Facebook outage that impacted the company’s globally-popular suite of social media apps last week certainly caused lots of headaches. But reports that the interruptions were due to issues on the network level proved premature. Facebook operates its own collection of 15 data centers globally, which serve as a redundant, internal backbone network. As a result, the public doesn’t readily...

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Enterprise IT and network ops teams may not appear to have much in common with the names on your NCAA March Madness bracket. But in both arenas, teams need to be masters of strategy, cooperation, and fast thinking in order to succeed. That’s because just like college basketball, network monitoring and management requires having both a strong offense and defense....

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The rate of change in the hospitality sector over the past decade has been staggering. While booking apps, AirBnB, and ratings websites have certainly been disruptors, it’s really the changing demands of travelers that have put technology at the center of the lodging experience. And hoteliers are taking note. A recent study from Forrester Research found that of all the...

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Hot on the heels of our recently introduced DNS monitoring capabilities, we’re excited to announce that we’ve enhanced AppNeta Performance Manager’s Route Visualization capabilities with BGP data, adding greater context to the insights within the platform’s Delivery dashboard. Our new Route Visualization brings you the big picture. You can see how DNS, content delivery networks, and BGP work together to...

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It’s not just enterprise networks that are feeling the impact of digital transformation. From government agencies to higher education, cloud migration and SaaS adoption are changing networking from the top-down, and putting unprecedented strain on IT departments as a result. One recent incident at Amherst College in Massachusetts illustrated perfectly what can happen when IT gets buried under an avalanche...

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Hot on the heels of the 2019 Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) comes Gartner’s Critical Capabilities Report for NPMD, and more great news for AppNeta! Not only did we advance to a Visionary placement in the MQ -- even as the field of qualified competitors narrowed to 16 vendors from 22 in 2018 -- but...

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There’s no denying that the SD-WAN market is having a moment. After sliding into the Trough of Disillusionment on the 2017 Gartner Hype Cycle, SD-WAN was firmly on the Slope of Enlightenment for 2018, and continues to build both momentum and advocacy as the decade comes to a close. What’s attractive about SD-WAN is that it doesn’t force teams to...

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Delivering visibility is central to everything we do at AppNeta. Not only does our platform allow enterprise IT to see into all corners of their network, but transparency and clarity is central to how we operate as a company, too. It’s fitting, therefore, that AppNeta was named a Visionary in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and...

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AppNeta Performance Manager provides several ways for customers to integrate monitoring data with other systems, including the RESTful API Observer endpoint that allows you to send event notifications to your own receiver. With this ability, the opportunity for flexible integration abounds. In a past post, I looked at how to integrate AppNeta Performance Manager events into Slack channels. Justin previously...

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While you’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary networking pro who still refers to the Internet as the “Information Superhighway,” the metaphor isn’t totally off-base. The Internet as we know it, after all, is a massive dynamic network of pathways that connect a global collection of enterprise- or ISP-owned Autonomous Systems (AS). Data travels over the Internet like cars...

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It’s a foregone conclusion that the future of enterprise business rests in the cloud. This is especially true when considering what a huge role cloud migration has played within the enterprise space over just the past few years: Spending on cloud computing has grown at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009, and is expected to grow at...

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This week there are two pieces of news in the DNS world which remind us that DNS is not simply “it just works” technology that can be forgotten about. Like many things, DNS requires a little ongoing care and attention! First is the US-CERT DNS Infrastructure Hijacking Campaign bulletin. It warns of an organized campaign to use compromised credentials to...

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Thanks in no small part to the widespread adoption of cloud technology, many of the biggest enterprise success stories of the recent past revolve around a business’ ability to support a distributed workforce. The benefits of this model are easy to see: Teams aren’t confined to the four walls of a central office, which opens up the pool of talent...

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AppNeta Performance Manager now supports DNS monitoring for Experience web paths!  Recent blog posts have covered some DNS background and the importance of monitoring DNS performance in a global enterprise environment, particularly the importance of monitoring from the perspective of your end users -- internal and external.  This post introduces AppNeta’s new DNS Monitoring capabilities and gets you started. To...

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The primary aim of digital transformation -- a phrase that lacks a clear definition, but encompasses swapping out legacy tech for the latest cloud apps -- is to streamline processes across the enterprise. There’s the promise of faster solutions, more connectivity between remote offices, and the ability for business to scale up with ease (and at minimal cost). Done successfully,...

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Enterprise IT and end users alike tend to take the Domain Name System (DNS) for granted. While those who don’t work in network operations might not even know what DNS is -- let alone the central role it plays in making the Internet a space humans can navigate -- even IT often just expects the system to always perform. DNS...

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Before the days of personal computing -- and well before the dawn of smart devices -- it was easier for the relatively few users leveraging the Internet to recognize familiar IP addresses, like memorizing a home phone number in the pre-caller ID days. While we may type URLs into search bars and click “Send” on email, computers don’t actually read...

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IN PRACTICE | This article is part of a series of posts sharing examples of how AppNeta users have leveraged the service to solve performance problems. Introduction Transient issues can be a huge problem on large network infrastructures. Not only are they hard to catch, but it is even harder to isolate root cause. A large US telecommunications customer continuously...

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IN PRACTICE | This article is part of a series of posts sharing examples of how AppNeta users have leveraged the service to solve performance problems. What Problem Was the Customer Attempting to Solve? In retail, slow performance in Point of Sale (POS) applications has an immediate impact. When numerous complaints came in regarding overall performance slowdowns for a large...

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IT ROLE: Network engineer for branch and wireless services NEEDS: Monitoring 500 remote locations with a small, centralized IT team RESULTS: Finding provider issues; creating network performance baselines We talked recently with a customer who runs AppNeta at a large and growing healthcare provider. This network engineer has just one other colleague helping to manage and monitor 500 locations around...

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From the earliest days of online-dating services, “love algorithms” searched almost exclusively on what clients deemed to be their ideal characteristics in a partner. Singles would check boxes on hair color, religion, location, and interests, and wait for the results. Undoubtedly, what came out didn’t really align with the kind of partner they were actually attracted to. Algorithms had to...

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The internet and rise of mobility mean that business users and the information systems they rely on are rarely in the same place any more. Users depend on their own devices, virtualization means their desktop isn't always on their desktop, applications run remotely and even simple telecom services are delivered via the internet. In addition, API-based services, big data and...

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We’re excited to announce some new features in AppNeta Performance Manager for our customers. Our engineers are constantly incorporating improvements and feature requests so that our application and network monitoring product is easy to use and gives you tons of details to find and solve any performance problems. Deploying and Accessing AppNeta You’ll notice a few essential updates in the...

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Metrics are meaningless. Well, that's not quite true. Raw metrics, when it comes to IT monitoring, are just numbers that don't tell you anything. A number may seem high, but not result in any problem visible to end users. Another number may seem low, but not be as low as SLAs require. The only way to make metrics meaningful is...

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SD-WAN is gaining traction quickly with a lot of businesses. If SD-WAN technology is on your radar, you likely want to improve the performance of networks and applications at remote offices. You may have jumped off the SD-WAN adoption cliff already, or are at least researching and considering it. With SD-WAN’s popularity, it has gained a silver bullet quality. It does...

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A network outage can be disruptive and expensive, so you want to eliminate the causes. This checklist of the top 10 questions to ask after a network outage can help you identify the reasons for an outage and expose any gaps in your monitoring. Ideally, you’ll learn from an outage to prevent others in the future. In addition to outages,...

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As businesses continue to migrate from expensive and inflexible MPLS network architectures, software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has emerged as a key technology for managing application and network load over the public internet. It’s particularly good for businesses with a large number of remote locations and an investment in MPLS circuits. What is SD-WAN? Organizations are deploying SD-WAN technology to pair multiple...

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The age-old bottleneck has plagued IT since the first wired connections were made. Network bottlenecks happen when the communication between network endpoints doesn’t have enough capacity to transfer data without overflowing network constraints. The problem could lie on the internal network, internet WAN or in the destination network, but are no longer commonly in the office. Most offices have a...

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Getting a full picture of applications in use on the network is essential for IT teams today. In the past, NetFlow functionality has been used to see apps in use. NetFlow, and similar technologies like sFlow and jFlow, is typically a router feature that looks at the traffic that's been sent and received, and then sends a summary of the...

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We launched AppNeta Performance Manager recently, and after all our excitement over letting the world know about it, we’re getting down to business here with some more details. The best part about our product (yes, we’re biased) is that it truly does cloud application monitoring. It’s what you’ll need in the stage after the excitement of finding and deploying cloud,...

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What’s your bandwidth-consuming vice these days? Maybe March Madness? You’re certainly not alone. Even employees in the very important Pentagon are hooked. The Pentagon’s ISP asked employees to reconsider streaming basketball games in light of the important work their bandwidth is supporting—defending the country and all that. We’re sure they have excellent network monitoring helping the effort to pin down...

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We were pretty excited here at AppNeta when we got the good news that we got high marks from users in Gartner’s Network Performance Monitoring-Diagnostics category. Gartner’s Critical Capabilities research examines how tech users actually choose and interact with the products they need. The resulting Critical Capabilities document matches industry personas with features, functionality, customer requirements, ease of use, ease...

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There are plenty of technology details that have gone through major changes in the cloud era. One networking detail in particular—tracking and managing quality of service (QoS)—is an essential one to master for modern IT. QoS metrics offer a way to mark traffic prioritization over networks in an attempt to guarantee a certain level of performance. So, QoS priority levels...

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When choosing a cloud provider, you can look at brand recognition, security and storage features and other items. But cloud providers depend on networks just like the rest of us, and they’re not all created or configured equal. In general, for those considering the cloud, it’s important to match up the location of your end users and the cloud location...

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Even though mass-market VoIP technology has been available since 2004, adoption rates have proved underwhelming for the last decade. VoIP adoption rates have picked up in recent years, but business-critical use cases such as the call center still seem to lag behind cloud services adoption in other parts of the enterprise. As the era of cloud communications further solidifies, using...

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Happy New Year! We’ve found some interesting news and analysis to kick off 2017. First, networking woes certainly haven’t disappeared. This CIO Insight story and accompanying survey data from networking professionals reflects some crucial concerns for IT networking teams today. For nearly three-quarters of respondents, network changes repeatedly cause performance issues, and 66% say that their network monitoring solution predicts...

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BGP, the border gateway protocol, is a creaky old network routing protocol. It was updated last in 2006, but it still serves a useful purpose. Almost every packet that traverses the internet finds its way from source to destination via BGP routing. This is what BGP was designed for, and while it’s not always the fastest route, it can divert...

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Moving business applications to the cloud seems like the holy grail for maximizing ROI and supporting an increasingly mobile and remote workforce. However, not all cloud migrations are created equal. Microsoft Office 365, in particular, is presenting challenges for enterprise networks. This isn’t like the old days, when IT upgraded one desktop per user to a new version of the...

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Happy Friday! From InformationWeek, we came across this story on the future of IT investment planning. It’s a great look at the shifts in IT roles that are happening as technology shifts take place in the data center and outside of it. The main takeaways here are that cloud services spending is practically guaranteed for IT going forward, and that...

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Back in the old days of networking, the parts of the whole were pretty easy to see. Network devices like routers and switches were in-house hardware, and the users accessing the network were probably in the same building as the network. In the same way, network performance was easy to see. The scope of troubleshooting didn’t extend much past the...

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IT’s job today is to keep user productivity high by providing a good app experience and well-running networks. There are plenty of challenges that can get in the way: shadow IT bringing in mystery SaaS apps, capacity planning and DDoS and other attacks. Not long ago, an event like Cyber Monday might have thrown yet another wrench in the infrastructure...

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As many of our customers have discovered, constant firefighting of performance issues is not a sustainable plan for growth. It’s a common predicament, though. In many data centers now, older legacy applications are running some business functions, while newer SaaS and web-based apps are running others. They’re on different networks, with entirely different architectures. But the goals of these old...

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