AppNeta by Broadcom Reviews

Most of the time, we use it for testing the performance of networks for voice and video. It's not designed to be exclusively that, but that's what we use it for most of the time because network performance for the voice and video is notoriously difficult to monitor and manage.

We've built a business around AppNeta because in the early days, it was, and it still is, a unique tool in the way it operates, and we do a lot of consulting work for much bigger companies. Most of our work comes from a company into video and voice solutions, but we have done a lot of work with other ISPs. Essentially, we've built the business around what AppNeta can do.

It works well for visibility into the internet and cloud environments. AppNeta works from a source probe, and it sends a low bandwidth stream of traffic to a target. If the target is not another probe, it has to use ICMP. One slight difficulty is that a lot of the cloud vendors don't allow ICMP into their cloud infrastructure. The way around that is to install a software probe in the cloud. So, AppNeta has installed software probes in nearly every Microsoft Azure location, and those probes are publicly accessible, which means we can reach them by using a different protocol. If we need to test somewhere that's not Azure, such as Amazon Web Services or Google, then we would need to install a software probe in the cloud. So, it's one more step than we've had to use in the past, but that's because of what cloud providers will allow and will not allow into their data centers.

In terms of active and passive monitoring for alerting us to the deterioration of digital experiences before users are impacted, the delivery side is always active because that's the way it works. The passive side is used to monitor the operational traffic that's on the network. It works fine, but we don't use it very much because there are always security implications. So, we only use the active side of the tool. The passive side looks at the operational traffic that's already on the network, which can become tricky security-wise because when you do that, you are able to see all of the traffic unless it's encrypted. We don't tend to use that. We have used it, and it's useful to work out notifications and alerting. From the active side, we can see if the utilization is high, but we can't tell what's causing the high utilization. If we can get security authorization, we can use the passive side to find out which applications are using all the bandwidth. Typically, we're mostly focused on the active side of the testing, and the alerting and the notifications are very useful.

We use the Automatic User Geo-Location feature. It happens automatically. It's not something that you can turn on or off. We do use it, but I'm always a little concerned about how accurate it might be. That has nothing to do with AppNeta. For example, if I try to find out where my home broadband is, quite often, it'll show me in London, whereas actually, I live 80 miles away from London. It's just where the IP address is logged. We do use it, but we use it cautiously. It's good for the remote workforce. We've done a lot of troubleshooting work for people working from home. Over the last couple of years, so many people have started working from home, and they've had to rely on commercial broadband rather than business broadband. Often, people have no experience in networking or troubleshooting. We're able to get them a software agent that can be installed on their machine, and then once it's on, we just remotely manage it from a central location. So, once a user has installed the probe, which is no more difficult than any other Windows or Mac application, they don't have to do anything else. We take it over from there. When AppNeta first brought the licensing out for working-from-home pros, it included 25 agents, and recently, they pulled that up to 50 agents. It's pretty useful. For the price of one standard license, you get 50 agents that you can either put in for people working from home, or you can put them in a branch office as if it was a hardware probe. We found it to be very flexible for that purpose.

In terms of ease of using the Automatic User Geo-Location feature to determine if a problem is user-specific or region-specific, it depends on how many agents are around. We do know what the ISP is because it automatically tells us the ISP, as well as the geolocation. If we see people in similar locations and they're having problems with the same ISP, we can pin that down to an ISP problem. It's a question of comparing and contrasting what all the users are doing, but the end-to-end thing is, AppNeta already has a system to work out where a problem might be, whether it's at the local end with the user, or at the remote destination end, or somewhere in between. It always has that ability. There's a combination of ways to find out where a problem might be getting caused and who's causing it and why.

It's very good for our Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) for performance issues across business-critical apps, locations, and users. Obviously, when you're dealing with an end-to-end path, the devices and the connections are not all owned by the same people. The local part of the network is owned by the customer or a third party. There may be one or more ISPs, and there might be an ISP at the local end and a different ISP at the remote end because we work globally. So, we may be testing between the US and the Far East, or with the UK and South Africa. There's always at least one telco, and normally, more than one telco. Although we can pinpoint the problem and find out who owns it, it doesn't mean we can fix it fast because it all depends on other third parties accepting what we say and getting on and fixing it for themselves. However, normally, if there's a problem that lasts more than, for example, 10 minutes, we pretty much know exactly where the problem is.

It hasn't had much effect on our mean time to resolve (MTTR) because we're not normally in a position to resolve it. We're all pretty much external consultants. We can explain to people where the problem is, but we don't have direct relationships with telcos, where we can instruct them to go and do this. The MTTR for a problem is a bit unpredictable, but that doesn't have anything to do with AppNeta. That has to do with convincing the person or the organization that owns the problem area to get on and fix it.

We have seen a reduction in open tickets using AppNeta. Before people used AppNeta, they didn't have a reliable method to find out where the problem was. Sometimes, when we work for a particular client, a problem ticket has been open for a month because the problem is periodic, and it is unpredictable when it happens. When it does happen, they don't have the right tool in place to monitor it, and then we come in and install AppNeta, and generally, we can get that ticket closed within a few days of us becoming involved. So, we often find that problem tickets have been open and unresolved for quite some time, and then we come in and put AppNeta in, and typically, we can get that ticket closed within a few days. It's just a matter of how quickly the people involve us in the problem. If we were involved right from the beginning, I'm pretty confident that it would definitely result in tickets getting closed earlier. Sometimes, tickets are getting closed within minutes because we've done our bit and we've said what the problem is and where the problem is. There's not really any point in holding the ticket open any longer because the resolution is up to some other third party like ISP or telco.

The main feature that we use is what they call Delivery, which is the testing of network paths end-to-end. They do provide synthetic web transactions, and they also provide the ability to actually look at traffic on the network, but we don't use web transactions very much. That's essentially because the customers we work with aren't interested in that side of the business. 

They should try and make diagnostics run a bit quicker. When the problem occurs on a network, AppNeta runs automatic diagnostics on the end-to-end path. The path it was testing only to the destination, it now runs the same test to all of the devices and all the intermediate devices. Depending on the number of intermediate devices, it can take several minutes to run. If we're trying to find or diagnose a problem that only lasts two or three minutes, it may be that the diagnostics is still running by the time the problem is cleared. The only thing, which I have also mentioned to AppNeta in the past, is that there should be much faster and much more lightweight diagnostics, which can be completed within 30 seconds or one minute, rather than in 5 to 10 minutes. 

Currently, when we have short-duration problems, we use a different tool, but we only use that different tool for short-duration problems. With AppNeta, as long as the problem exists for more than a few minutes, such as within 10 to 15 minutes, we can normally tell where the problem is. However, most of the problems that we deal with are intermittent. They're very rarely a permanent condition that needs to be addressed. That makes it more difficult to troubleshoot. We would look to see at least two or three events and hope they show the same results to raise our confidence that we've actually found the problem, rather than just a problem.

Broadcom acquired AppNeta earlier this year, but I've been using AppNeta for about 12 years.

It's stable.

It's scalable. In terms of its usage, we use AppNeta exclusively for end-to-end network and app visibility across managed and unmanaged networks. We have looked at other products in the past, but AppNeta is still the one we typically use as our first choice. We do use some other products specifically for troubleshooting rather than long-term continuous monitoring, but 99% of what we do uses AppNeta only. For only 1%, we use a couple of other products.

It has always been excellent. It's always pretty much a 10 out of 10.

Positive

We didn't use any other tool previously. We worked in much more general-purpose networking management, and when we were introduced to AppNeta a long time ago, we saw that we could quickly build a business specifically around it. We didn't suddenly change to AppNeta. We just created a brand-new business using AppNeta.

There are other products that do synthetic web transactions for the delivery side of what they call Delivery, which is the network performance, but AppNeta uses a pretty unique technology. AppNeta has been going for nearly 20 years. They used to be called Apparent Networks, and they changed their name around 10 or 12 years ago. They've been using pretty much the same technology, which I don't believe anybody else has. That's why we've always used AppNeta.

It's a cloud-based portal, but the probes that we install at the customer sites can be software or hardware. The software has been very valuable over the last couple of years because, with COVID, so many customers closed some sites. So, we couldn't ship a hardware probe to a particular site because there was nobody there to receive it or install it. With a software probe, we just downloaded from the portal and installed it, and we were up and running within minutes. It's a software-as-a-service, but we can use dedicated hardware or software probes that are installed with the user.

Typically, we don't go on-site and install anything, but we do pre-configure any equipment so that the customer can just plug it in, and if the firewall requirements have been met, then it'll just work. It's simple to do that. AppNeta does offer a private on-prem version, but we never used it.

The process for configuring it is straightforward. We just ask the customer for various addressing information. It's a very simple device. It only needs about six pieces of information that the customer gives us. We configure it and ship it. If it's a software probe, we don't even need anything like that because the customers just download and install it themselves. There's no preconfiguration that we need to do. When the probe comes online on the portal, then we just configure the destination targets that we want to run the path test on, and we just press go. That's it.

We take about an hour to configure the probe, but actually, it only takes us a few minutes to do the configuration. We like to leave it running for a little while just to make sure everything is okay with it from the software side of things and the hardware. If the customer installs the hardware, or they install the software, we can be up and running and measuring the performance within about half an hour.

For the configuration, there are only two of us. Either of us can do it. It just depends on who has got the hardware probe. A lot of the work we do is fairly long-term, so we might do a network assessment for the pre-deployment of video and voice, which might take two or three months if it's a very large network. Quite often, what happens is that once the customer sees what can be done with the probes for an assessment or a troubleshooting engagement, typically, they'll keep the probes on anyway. We only do the configuration once per probe, and that configuration may well last several years.

In terms of maintenance, the software upgrades are handled by AppNeta themselves. It does require maintenance, but AppNeta manages that centrally, and it's pretty much transparent.

We have seen an ROI. Most of our work is involved with voice and video. If there are voice and video problems, it makes a call practically useless. People have spent a fortune on installing voice and video room products, and even individual products now. The return on the investment for the application that we get working is much more valuable than the return on the investment for investing in the actual tool itself. We're not exclusively voice and video. If you have a web app that is running very slowly, we can use AppNeta to work out if the problem is at the user end, if it's the network, or if it's the actual application server itself. All of that is invaluable. 

Every customer spends a massive amount of money on all the applications that they run. If the applications don't run correctly, they're not very productive, and all of that investment in those applications is wasted. If you have one application that the entire company uses, with thousands of people using it, the return on the investment to get that running properly again is almost incalculable.

That's a little difficult because the licensing costs are different depending on the type of probe that you have. We typically don't get involved in the commercial side, but the list price is probably something like $3,000 for a small probe. However, that gives all of the features that the probe can do, whether or not you use them. In the old days, up until two or three years ago, each of the separate features was a separately licensable module so that you could add things that you wanted, and you didn't have to add things that you didn't want. They've changed all that now, and everything the probe can do is a part of the base license. It's a bit tricky to specify the pricing because if you do use all of the features, which we don't, then it's really good value for money, but as there's nothing else like it, it's still an essential purchase. We don't seem to have any problem with customers seeing the value in paying that.

The small probe is probably around $3,000 and the very large probe that they make for massive data centers might be $50,000 or $60,000. It's a subscription model, so the payment is per year. 

One of the other products that we looked at was ThousandEyes, and we specifically didn't go for that. It has some similarities to AppNeta, but we specifically did not go for that because it had a very unpredictable licensing model. In that, you had to decide how many times you wanted to run a test. If you decide you are going to run a test every five minutes, and that becomes not good enough and you then want to change the testing to every one minute, effectively, you use up five times the number of licenses. It's very unpredictable what the cost of the ThousandEyes product is going to be. With the type of work we do, testing once every 5 minutes or every 10 minutes is nowhere near adequate.

To those evaluating this solution, I'd recommend that they get some help from someone like ourselves because AppNeta does take a certain amount of interpretation of what the results are telling you. That might not be immediately obvious if somebody has never used it before, and they try to start working on it without any training. Since Broadcom acquired AppNeta, the training documentation has improved quite a lot. I would definitely recommend looking at the Broadcom training website for AppNeta because it can get you up to speed very much quicker than what used to be the case a few years ago.

I'd rate it a 10 out of 10. We've used it all the time. We were lucky in that we've always had really close access to the people in AppNeta, and we've made suggestions about product improvements and things like that. In general, they've always done it within a few months or a year. Now that they're Broadcom, I don't know if we'll have that close relationship, but as far as I can see, nothing has changed with the way we operate together. It has always been a really good, healthy, and cooperative relationship between ourselves and the AppNeta people.

Our main use cases are SD-WAN or a cloud migration or an application moving to SaaS. Most of our customers are moving to SaaS and cloud, and from traditional MPLS to SD-WAN networks. We want to tell our customers what the experience is like during and after the implementation of SD-WAN, or during the migration of an on-prem application to SaaS. We want to tell them what the application performance is like, or what the network performance is like. That is what we provide to customers and it is our main focus area for the product.

I am in pre-sales and, here in the Middle East, and most of our customers here do not go with SaaS. They mostly have on-prem data centers and go with SD-WAN. They connect their branch with SD-WAN and they want to know what the performance is of their SD-WAN terminals. That is the major use case in this region.

Apart from that, because most of our users are working from home, we also concentrate on providing user-experience information for any application that an end-user is using while working from home.

It helps when it comes to monitoring ISPs or SLAs undertaken by SaaS providers, to make sure that they are meeting the SLAs they have promised. IT engineers who are sitting in our office do not have access to what is happening with SaaS and cloud applications. So when a user is having issues with such an application, he will contact the internal IT team. Without AppNeta, the IT engineer cannot be sure where, exactly, the problem is because he has no access to or visibility into the network outside the office. Having AppNeta can provide a clear picture of where the problem is and the engineer can use it as proof to show the ISP or the SaaS application provider if the problem is on their side.

Before a user encounters an issue, we have the points that are being actively monitored and we are alerted from different locations. With AppNeta in place, we can check whether the issue is in one branch office or location or it is in different locations. It might be a problem on the application side. AppNeta helps us identify exactly where the problem is.

Generally, an end-user will not open a ticket the moment they see a problem. They will wait for maybe five or 10 minutes. Only once they feel that, yes, there is an issue, will they open a ticket. With the active monitoring in place, we know that there is a problem because the monitors keep checking the network every minute. Before the user experiences it and opens a ticket, we are aware of the problem and are going to fix it. When the IT team is aware of a problem that affects most users, the number of tickets is definitely going to be reduced because they know where a problem is and are fixing it before other people experience it. With AppNeta, we have seen a reduction in tickets of 15-plus percent.

In terms of MTTR, once you have identified an issue, the resolution time will depend on how quickly the engineer can resolve it. Monitoring solutions are only there to pinpoint where exactly the problem is. After that, it's the IT team that has to take care of it, whether they have to contact the respective SD-WAN vendor or SaaS provider or ISP. AppNeta reduces our MTTR for sure.

The usage feature is very good. It provides the users of applications, the details of who is using the network, and which application when there was a huge usage of bandwidth. We have 2,000-plus applications registered, including Netflix, Facebook, et cetera. So we can monitor the usage of anyone who is trying to access them and take necessary actions to make sure that the bandwidth is not over-utilized.

AppNeta also provides visibility into managed and unmanaged networks. For an end-user to do their daily work, they need to access either a SaaS or on-prem application, or maybe it is in a data center. If there is some issue with that application, they can't get their work done. The IT team can install software on the end-user's laptop to continuously monitor things and get complete visibility, from the end-user perspective, into where exactly the problem is.

In addition, we get complete, hop-by-hop visibility into the internet and we can know how much latency is taking place from one hop to another. That way, we know whether a particular hop belongs to the ISP, or that it is something owned by our own client's office, or is something to do with the SaaS network.

And we can do active synthetic monitoring of any application or of the network to get what the delivery and the experience are like. That definitely provides us with proactive monitoring where it keeps checking the network with respect to an application and with respect to network latencies. It can alert us about any abnormal activities based on thresholds that are configured.

We also monitor everything that is passing through a SPAN port, whatever is going to the core switch. We span everything out and then we put it into AppNeta. The application reads everything and knows who's using what and can give us details about that. This helps us know that the network is functioning properly and that it is not over-utilized in terms of bandwidth.

I would like to see some advanced dashboard features. It could also be integrated with third-party tools. For example, an integration with a reporting solution would be helpful. Out-of-the-box, there are few dashboards or reports. What it does have is useful, but there should be additional dashboards.

We have been using AppNeta by Broadcom for a year and a half.

It is stable. As of now, we haven't come across any major issues.

It is very scalable. You can increase it to N monitoring points and N applications being monitored. It is highly scalable.

Technical support has always been number-one when it comes to Broadcom. The support is always good and they are maintaining the MTTR for closing tickets. Everything is being achieved.

Positive

We can deploy it on-prem, via SaaS, or in the cloud.

The setup is very straightforward. For now, as we are mostly doing PoCs, we are going with a SaaS deployment because an on-prem implementation will take more time to procure hardware on the client side. But if a customer requests an on-prem PoC, we can definitely do it. But with SaaS, everything is there. You just create tenants and you're good to go. You just need to install software on the customer's side and a couple of network ports and it's over.

The implementation time depends on how many branch locations a client has and how many applications they want to monitor. You have to have software installed or hardware installed wherever you want monitoring.

If it is a software setup, we can have it on VMware and it takes about 15 minutes to turn on a monitoring point. Once it is up, it connects automatically with the SaaS, and then you do work on the applications you want to monitor. If you only want to monitor one or two applications, you can finish up in a day.

If you want to monitor an application used by the finance team, for example, and that team is on a different VLAN or it's connected to a different switch, to get the exact end-user performance report, you need to place the monitoring point very close to the users. In this example, the point has to be connected to the finance switch.

Setting up the Broadcom side, one person is enough, but you need the network team to allow the ports and the application team as well.

I have never compared the pricing with competitors, because that is handled by our sales team. But in my opinion, Broadcom software is always a little expensive because they provide quality.

The main competitor of AppNeta in our region, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South Africa, is Cisco ThousandEyes. With AppNeta we can provide better application performance metrics and better SD-WAN-related network performance.

Before AppNeta, Broadcom had good software for monitoring on-prem devices or the network VPN and MPLS, et cetera. But with new technologies like SD-WAN and SaaS-based applications, there was a gap when it came to monitoring. With the acquisition of AppNeta, this gap was completely fixed. Now, we have Broadcom DX NetOps which does everything related to on-prem, and we have SaaS AppNeta, which does everything that was missing with NetOps. Both are now integrated with each other and we have complete visibility of on-prem, SaaS, and internet.

I would recommend going with the SaaS model. It's easy to manage and I believe it is much cheaper than on-prem maintenance. With SaaS there is no maintenance charged to the customer. Also, new features and upgrades are done directly on SaaS, but it can take a month or two to get those features available in an on-prem solution.

Fundamentally, it is for network monitoring or user experience monitoring. We've deployed the hardware appliances all around our network environment at all of our branch office sites and even some of our larger sites. We use it to run synthetic transactions back and forth between the actual appliances, as well as some HTTP servers and other similar devices.

It is software-as-a-service. So, we are using whatever version they upgrade to.

It has helped us to see issues or problems rather than having a customer report them.

A lot of times one of the AppNeta transactions showed that there is an issue, whereas everything seemed to be working properly. Once we dug into it, we realized that it really was highlighting a problem that otherwise we would not have seen. The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is to always trust the tool.

The path analysis is most valuable. I really like the fact that it keeps all of the path analysis data. When something happens in the environment, it is helpful for taking a look at what changed. That's something that's different from other network monitoring or QoE tools that I've seen before.

An area of improvement would be to move back towards what AppNeta used to have directly before the Broadcom acquisition. Before it was purchased by Broadcom, back when it was AppNeta, everything online was much better than now. Some of the Broadcom changes have made using what's online less efficient. The biggest thing would be if they could simplify the Broadcom website.

Having to deal with configuring the end devices using a USB stick is a bit cumbersome. It would be nice if there was a better way of handling that.

I have been using this solution for about a year.

We haven't had any problems with it yet. It seems to be relatively stable.

It is multi-tenant. So, it scales well, and that was the nice thing about it. The other part of the business using it is just in a different tenant configured under the same organization.

Currently, it is in the end-user environment. We have an AppNeta appliance, which is deployed in an end-user segment at every office. There are about 20 to 25 locations, and it is used primarily by the IT group. We do have plans to increase its usage.

Their support is excellent. It is one of the best tech support experiences that I've had with any vendor. You open a ticket online, which is rather straightforward, and you wind up getting an email back from tech support, and they know what they're talking about. They can see into your configurations. With software-as-a-service, that works really well. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We were using NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE. We switched because AppNeta was in use by another part of the organization. We basically consolidated down to a single vendor for the solution.

It was relatively straightforward. It was fine except for having to configure the end devices by using the USB stick. That process can be a bit cumbersome.

We did it in-house. There were only three people involved, and it was basically just opening up boxes, configuring the devices, shipping them out to the individual offices, and then working with the people on site to get them dropped onto the right network.

It doesn't require any maintenance. It is software-as-a-service. That's what I like about it.

We have seen an ROI in terms of being able to pinpoint problems before they're reported by the customer.

I inherited this from a different version, and I haven't yet gone through a renewal because we had purchased three years upfront. So, to me, that still remains to be seen. Once it comes up for renewal, we'll see what happens. Especially because now it is Broadcom, it is going to change anyway.

We didn't evaluate other options because we already had a solution, and this solution was chosen by a different part of the organization. So, it just made sense.

It seems a little bit heavy at first, but after you get into it and start working with it, it is quite easy to use.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.