Answering the age-old question "Is it the app or the network?"
Introducing new app-centric workflows now available in IBM SevOne to quickly understand the impact of network performance on applications
Networks are built to serve the needs of users accessing applications. If users are having a poor experience, they don’t contact IT and say "core router 23 is having issues”. Rather they say “It’s quarter end, and the sales quoting app is really slow today from the Chicago office...help!”.
One of the first questions IT typically needs to determine is “Is the app or the network”? When the network operations team gets the ticket they’ll typically start a troubleshooting workflow from a network device perspective, looking for devices that are having performance issues. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to effectively ask your network observability system “How is the sales quoting app working in Chicago today from a network performance perspecitive?“
Many users have asked for the ability to start a network traffic analysis or exploration workflow with an Application or a host IP address instead of a network resource like device or interface. Whether its troubleshooting an issue with a server or a user is saying they are having trouble with WebEx or connecting to enterprise app server, it would really help to be able to see their network and traffic performance data starting with an application. This is very valuable when users are not aware of the underlying infrastructure or know which device is having an issue while troubleshooting an application issue.
Today report creators have to create a flow filter to accomplish this and define it like this webex_filter = ( app_profile = Webex ) and configure and apply this same filter across each and every widget in the flow report, like this:
Pre-defined flow filters in the Report
Lets review a series of new features in IBM SevOne that make it easy to start a troubleshooting workflow from an application perspective enabling quicker insights.
App Centric Workflows - Starting a workflow with the application
We wanted to make it easier to flexibly troubleshoot hundreds of enterprise applications (including custom apps) and over 5000 different of SaaS applications ( built-in to platform and available OOTB). In NPM Release 6.7, we introduced the application report variable which contains a fully searchable drop-down list of applications and allows users to filter the entire report on one or more apps of interest. As a bonus, it also includes a short description summarizing the purpose of the app. Reports are more dynamic and flexible. The report viewer can customize the report by selecting applications of interest. All this without having edit permissions on the report or requesting updated report with needed pre-defined filters.
Quickly and easily search for an application
Now that is a long list of apps to search, so in NPM 7.0 we gave the SevOne admin the ability to curate that list of apps to include only apps that are of interest to the business. As an admin I can create reports with application report variables that are tailored to specific use cases of the user.
Additionally, report creator and report viewers can navigate the list of apps by filtering on application category. The application category groups all the apps in a hierarchy of built in categories. For example, Webex and Zoom are part of Collaboration Tools category and Microsoft Office365 is part of Productivity Tools category. Now IBM SevOne admins can curate which app categories and which apps to include in the App report variable and provide a cascading category filter in the report to help users quickly search the application list. Now users can filter the list of apps by category to quickly locate an app of interest!
Connecting Network performance with Applications
IBM SevOne users can quickly and easily use the application report variable to drill into an application, view the traffic metrics associated with a specific application like Webex and easily pivot to a performance metrics report using quick chain (introduced in SevOne NPM 6.6) to understand the performance of the network infrastructure carrying that application. This allows them to connect network performance with applications easily for quick insights.
Easily Pivot from Flow to PM using Quick Chain
Sample Application Reports available in Community Library
To help IBM SevOne users get started with Application centric reports, we have prepared a series of samples reports you can import into IBM SevOne. The reports will quickly give you insights into bandwidth usage by applications (services), application category, country and AS (autonomous system) using Netflow data enriched with SaaS application and Category, country and AS information. This capability is built-in into the IBM SevOne NPM and was introduced in releases NPM 6.4 and 6.6.
As your organization grows and your network evolves, you need a scalable and robust monitoring platform that can adapt to your changing needs like IBM SevOne NPM. It provides end to end visibility across hybrid cloud spanning heterogenous networks including on-premise, SDWAN, public cloud, WiFi environments. Integrating both infrastructure metrics and network traffic analysis in a single tool designed to scale to largest enterprises and service provider deployments.