Introduction
Data centers are becoming more and more agile to keep pace in today’s modern digital world. As a business accelerates, and its application infrastructure continues to grow in complexity, how can the team keep pace with the increased pressure on the network? All too often, even the simplest configuration error can cause sig-nificant downtime, and without a sound automation platform, it may take hours (or even days) to troubleshoot outages across complex network infrastructure. This solution guide examines the challenges impacting the modern network, the issues they create for NetOps leaders, and how organizations can remedy them through end-to-end visibility.
The Challenge
Networks today are key to enabling digital success. With thousands of applications and hundreds of network devices to consider, the massive growth in network traffic continues for everyday enterprises. From the retail to the financial services to the banking industry, applications are quickly becoming the driving force behind businesses.
The crucial availability of these applications are entirely dependent on the strength of the networks they are supported by, as well as the tools used to manage them. Unfortunately, the majority of today’s existing solutions and management approaches are not designed for comprehensive application visibility or quick fixes. The problem is that certain network tools are designed to monitor specific aspects of network and application performance, rather than end-to-end visibility.
The Solution
Advanced network solutions like AppViewX supports NetOps with much more than just automation to prevent costly outages. Today the platform offers full application visibility along with the controls needed to properly implement them.
In-house solutions can become unwieldy when there are more than just a handful of network devices to manage. When users are working on enterprise-scale deployments that include a mixture of multi-vendors devices, centralized automation tools can help control the process by offering greater insight into the inner workings of your application infrastructure.
With advanced tools, NetOps teams maintain complete visibility of critical applications and their respective traffic flows to better understand how minor outages affect them. They will gain visibility into what the applications are, which ADC devices the applications are on, which services they need to access, what other dependencies the applications have, who owns the applications, etc. With complete application visibility, you can ensure essential applications are available and operating as they should be.
The AppViewX Platform: A Path to Complete Application Network Visibility
In the past, network management and monitoring was much simpler than it is today. However, modern networks are complex and addressing management challenges requires continuous monitoring of your application network through the use of an advanced and centralized platform.
The AppViewX Platform is a modular, low-code software application that enables the automation and orchestration of network infrastructure using an intuitive, context-aware, visual workflow. It provides an application-centric view into the state of the application delivery infrastructure, which enables teams to monitor critical business services on-premise or in the cloud, reduce visibility gaps, speed up the troubleshooting process, increase service levels, and improve overall operational efficiency.
Effective management and monitoring starts with a single comprehensive view of the application delivery infrastructure that ultimately allows NetOps leaders to avoid downtime, as explained in this guide. Adopted by multiple top financial institutions, AppViewX gives NetOps leaders the end-to-end visibility they need to maintain a solid application network.
Stay in the Know When it Comes to the Status of Your Applications Using Live Topology Mapping
Maintaining a clear view of your application delivery infrastructure is key to proper management of that infrastructure. In fact, the ability to clearly identify the application’s status at any given time directly affects the success of your modern infrastructure. Unfortunately, most enterprises can’t truly say they have a full and centralized view of their application infrastructure. This means that when an outage occurs, they don’t have the crucial ability to take a detailed look at the application when it matters most, forcing the entire NetOps team to scroll through pages and pages of configurations to identify the problem. Our platform’s AppVision module generates an application-centric view of all of the resources/devices associated with the particular application. The system dynamically creates a topology view of your application delivery infrastructure commonly referred to as Inframaps.
In the sample Inframap above, you’ll see an application instance and its mapping to firewalls, load balancers, profiles, pool members, end servers, certificates, etc. Using maps like this one, users can receive more details on policies, certificate expiry, and more by just clicking on each component. So, with this single comprehensive application view, NetOps leaders can easily identify which service is unavailable in minutes.
Manage Critical Applications Using Custom Dashboards
The digital transformation phenomenon has given way to an application economy that demands 100% uptime. Due to this radical shift, the way operations must undergo an overhaul as well so that NetOps can manage business critical applications simply and efficiently.
The Dashboard module in the AppViewX platform makes things easier by enabling the user to manage, monitor, and interpret all the configured applications and their objects. It generates a customized view so users can just log-in and view their own applications. For example, the user could customize their dashboard to view a group of virtual servers or data centers allowing partners to perform functionalities like enabling, disabling and taking servers in and out of rotation. This functionality allows for complete application-centric visibility and control over critical applications that you want to monitor at any given time.
Troubleshoot Outages Faster Through Automation
Application network visibility is most crucial during application outages, when troubleshooting is underway. Without a detailed look at the application, it is difficult to address an issue, leading to increased downtime.
The AppViewX Platform offers NetOps and application teams with much more than just automation to prevent those costly outages. When users are working on enterprise-scale deployments that include a mixture of network devices like firewalls, load balancers, servers, certificates, and so on, Inframaps can help control the process by offering greater insight into the application delivery infrastructure.
The Tshoot utility is a single touch troubleshooting and monitoring tool included in AppVision that enables network engineers to identify and remediate network issues (such as CPU spike, firewall port block, or ping checks) at a device or object level. It is configured and defined for an application using the CLI commands, scripts, and custom monitors. This allows the user to perform a connectivity check from one end point (Source IP) to another end point (Destination IP) across all the components of an application. During an outage, the fix provided can be saved and can also be reused in later incidents.
Self-Service and Launch Automation for Agile NetOps
Lack of standardized processes, holistic automation methodology and overall collaboration are the common reasons for troubleshooting delays. Multiple stakeholders are involved in managing an application delivery infrastructure, and in a more modern network, the process is even more complicated. In most scenarios, it takes much more time to determine the steps needed to fix an issue than to actually execute the solution.
Creating a truly agile data center requires different elements to be managed cohesively across subject-matter teams. The AppViewX Platform provides granular object-level, role-based access control and visual workflows enabling end-users to self-service and launch automation from application-centric views and dashboards. With granular access, one can define what a user can and cannot do by enabling or disabling functionalities, triggering a workflow, and accessing devices or individual objects.
Conclusion
The AppViewX platform provides industry-leading visibility into the components that make up today’s enterprise-defining data centers. The system allows users to efficiently troubleshoot network issues across multi-vendor and hybrid data centers, and through automation workflows, NetOps can identify and quickly isolate network issues that impact critical applications in a standardized way. Book your free demonstration with an AppViewX Solution Architect to learn how we can help your organization gain visibility and avoid application downtime.
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