NetBrain Managing Application Delivery By Network Intent Solution Brief_9-8-22

SOLUTION BRIEF Managing Application Delivery by Network Intent Most large enterprise networks grow increasingly more complex over many years of change, so ® the end-to-end performance of applications residing upon the underlying connectivity may degrade, suffer, or become unmanageable. In Splunk’s, The State of Observability 2022 survey of hundreds of enterprise IT professionals, respondents reported that 53% of their customer 1 satisfaction issues were due to application performance issues. And not surprisingly, the most impacted services reported include QoS-dependent applications such as video-streaming and collaboration or those dependent on modern, complex network architectures like MACH (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless). When user experience suffers, so does the business. In This instills a myopic view of the network focusing only on enterprises where poor documentation and brute-force hardware infrastructure using quantitative metrics to support have been operational staples for years, today’s maintain network components. businesses require a different approach. The directive for NetOps teams is clear: operate more efficiently, improve Yet quantitative network device health alone is not enough the balance between reactive and proactive efforts and to determine if the business services that reside upon the focus on preserving and enforcing desired behaviors of network are performing as the solutions and enterprise the network, not just the health of their hardware architects intended. This requires qualitative understanding components alone. Successful NetOps teams must have a of the hybrid network; with an end-to-end view of the clear understanding of the network requirements for every capabilities, it offers and its ability to support all the design application and a means to ensure those applications are requirements each business application required at delivered over the network at a high quality. deployment. Only network management using Intent can deliver true application assurance. Most network monitoring tools use network device health as a proxy for service delivery performance. This lack of Application Performance Begins with application and business intent understanding leads to an Network Intent inherent disconnect with the business needs. While scale and scope of network infrastructures have dramatically Most network operations solutions treat the network in a increased over time, these tools have continued to focus very binary fashion: links, paths, and devices are whether on aggregating device health. up or down. 1 Source: www.splunk.com/en_us/pdfs/gated/research/state-of-observability-2022.pdf

SOLUTION BRIEF Managing Application Delivery by Network Intent For network operations professionals, quantitative and binary analysis is a familiar way of assessing network performance: 0-1, true-false, on-off, up-down. When issues with applications or services occur, network engineers rarely ask themselves the state of CPU or memory usage on each network device or the status of every network link. But end-user experience is more complex; it’s a whole range of qualitative conditions that go far beyond connected or disconnected. That means asking application-specific connectivity questions concerning latency, jitter, or other qualitative dependencies. For example, users may be able to access a critical web-based application, but performance is so slow that it impacts overall productivity or customer satisfaction. Should that application be one from the entire class of real-time, interactive multi- media applications (such as VoIP or streaming video) and any problems in these networks are magnified dramatically. Hence, while connectivity may exist, the quality of those connections can vary widely. In a survey by When thinking of application performance, we cannot think of uptime alone. Network AppDynamics, health is the entire spectrum between available and unavailable. In fact, in a survey by AppDynamics, 84% of respondents maintain that performance of business applications is more important than ever. Network support teams know full well that assuring services on the network is much more than verifying if devices and interfaces are “up.” 84% In today’s world, the network must have a complete understanding of the needs of the business services that run on to ensure high-performance application delivery and successful user experiences. Network Intent provides the means to assign quality to of respondents connectivity and allows network tools to use intended performance as a reference in maintain that the execution of all management and monitoring operational tasks. performance of To reliably support the desired performance of all business applications concurrently, business applications businesses require a network automation solution that can identify and enforce every is more important individual network service and its state in the context of its entire application portfolio. than ever NetBrain’s Intent-Based Application Assurance takes network management, monitoring, and automation a step further by encoding all the network requirements for each business application and then assuring full function across the hybrid network. This enables network operations teams to manage all application paths to preserve the application architects’ design intents and support the user experience. NetBrain PDAS Application Assurance As part of its Problem Diagnosis Automation System (PDAS), NetBrain’s Application Assurance capabilities reorients network management to support the connectivity needs of all of your business applications. Application Assurance augments the typical, but rudimentary, A-to-B path checks with Network Intents to provide a full assessment of the health of the network in the context of all business-critical applications. From one dashboard, you can check connectivity state, view topology, verify intents, compare traffic flows against best or ‘Golden’ paths for each application, and view history of every state or path change.

SOLUTION BRIEF Managing Application Delivery by Network Intent Most modern applications are comprised of multiple components, APIs and microservices which are located at various network locations each with a specific network path performance requirement. For example, an application server may be dependent on low-latency and high throughput access to shared network storage to fulfill front-end requests. Client requests to that same application may require address resolution from DNS located at a different point in the topology, and another set of micro-services may be providing customer account history needed to complete Simply put, NetBrain’s new transactions. Application Assurance NetBrain’s Application Assurance capability allows network support teams to better is the automated means validate crucial application paths by visualizing all the individual network to monitor and diagnose components involved in the delivery of each application and then verifying each of the hybrid network in those components is providing the established Network Intents. Simply put, NetBrain’s the context of the Application Assurance is the automated means to monitor and diagnose the hybrid applications it is network in the context of the applications it is intended to support, not the individual intended to support, not network devices. the individual network devices Application Assurance continuously verifies Network Intents and notify ops teams of path changes or deviations. Application Manager, Application Assurance’s consolidated dashboard, displays all the crucial application network paths along with history and status for a holistic view of the network state, topology, and performance. NetBrain Application Assurance allows network ops teams to ensure ongoing application performance with 6 key capabilities: 1. Discover, calculate, and map each application’s path across all hybrid network infrastructure (regardless of vendor) from edge to cloud 2. Set the baseline path or Golden Path for each application 3. Create Network Intents that verify the network performance needed to ensure each application performs as originally designed 4. Validate application paths during change management tasks 5. Automatic validations triggered by integrations with ITSMs like ServiceNow or proactively scheduled directly from NetBrain 6. View historical events like path changes or Intent results to query and review anomalies Feature Highlights Intent-based application path verifications Identifying network paths is a great first step in validating application availability. NetBrain’s built-in checklist automatically executes a comprehensive series of verifications to determine path integrity validating a litany of network states and conditions. End-to-end connectivity alone, however, does not indicate whether or how an application or IT service will perform. Application Assurance now includes Path Intents to allow engineers to pre-define additional parameters tailored to individual application requirements. Does an application path successfully traverse firewalls or load balancers? Is the latency of a specific path too high for a voice application? Is the established QoS policy in compliance? Is the application path reliant on redundant gateway protocols? In all these cases, NetBrain can verify connectivity and check for any drift in the intent of the network. Intents unlock a network administrator’s ability to truly assess the health of the network in the context of application needs.

SOLUTION BRIEF Managing Application Delivery by Network Intent Validate the Golden Path NetBrain automatically calculates possible traffic paths once a desired network path is defined and operators can manually designate or let NetBrain intelligently calculate one path out of the many potential paths as the “Golden Path”—the optimal and preferred path the application traffic should take. If the active path changes away from the Golden Path due to unexpected network failures or even change windows with unintended results, Application Assurance highlights the problem and notifies operators to take corrective action. Automated monitoring and troubleshooting With Application Assurance, network health verifications are executed regularly or as part of change management tasks or even when triggered by external monitoring tools like ServiceNow or Splunk. This proactive monitoring can be set to provide alerts or reports greatly reducing incident MTTR or preventing production incidents altogether. Unified Dashboard NetBrain’s Application Assurance’s dashboard, Application Manager, displays all your applications and their network paths and intents on one screen. All traffic paths are organized by applications or services. With NetBrain Application Assurance, you can view The dashboard provides the status of path and intent checks, statistics on failed or changed paths, and filtered one place to ensure rows based on results. NetBrain enables operators to perform network investigations the network consistency quickly with path calculations and mappings, creation of new applications and paths or required by importing and exporting of application and path data. The dashboard provides one applications place to ensure the network consistency required by applications. Historical Change Visibility Application Assurance allows operators to see a complete history of all the automated checks that it continuously performs at regular intervals over time. This provides operators the ability to quickly troubleshoot and diagnose application performance at the traffic flow level.

SOLUTION BRIEF Managing Application Delivery by Network Intent Benefits Maintain network design compliance NetBrain verifies the network and application architects’ design intents to ensure the hybrid network is optimized for all application paths critical to the productivity of the business. Automatically maintain the compliance of the network by scheduling recurring application traffic path verifications to detect deviations from the Golden Path, changes from the previous state and deviations from Network Intents. Prevent configuration drift by verifying routing and security policies. Preventive and proactive alerts Application Assurance triggers alerts whenever it detects failures in end-to-end connectivity, any changes to traffic paths, or deviations from the established network intents. The alerts provide the errors detected and the applications those errors are associated with. Scalability Application Assurance enables easy monitoring of network behavior even as the network grows. It does so by organizing monitoring and troubleshooting processes around applications and their associated Intents, not network devices or individual About NetBrain network paths. Instead of monitoring and validating hundreds of unrelated network paths, NetBrain groups network paths with their associated application or services for Technologies quicker intent verification and richer problem diagnosis. Founded in 2004, Flexibility NetBrain is the market NetBrain's solution is vendor and technology agnostic. No matter the mix of vendors or leader for NetOps devices installed on your network, nor technologies of the network itself— traditional, automation, providing SDN, SD-WAN, cloud, or any hybrid combination—NetBrain abstracts the design and network operators and function of your network through its innovative use of network intents, to assure engineers with dynamic application performance is supported. visibility across their hybrid networks and low-code/no-code automation for key tasks Summary across IT workflows. Today, more than 2,500 NetBrain’s Application Assurance enables any network infrastructure to be continuously of the world’s largest verified for compliance with your organization’s application architectures and enterprises and implementation plans. NetBrain uses its intent-based automation to encode the desired managed service behavior of any network in the context of the applications it serves and then proactively providers use NetBrain verifies those application and business intents. to automate network problem diagnosis, Application Assurance greatly reduces costly downtime and degradation of business- generate real-time documentation, critical applications and services, ensuring maximum uptime and improving operational accelerate efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. NetBrain’s revolutionary automated troubleshooting, and Application Assurance technology assures that your hybrid network is fully compliant with enforce enterprise your enterprise architects’ application and design intents and directly supports the needs architectural rules. of your business, its applications, and your customers. Copyright © 2022 NetBrain Technologies, Inc. All trademarks referenced herein belong to NetBrain Technologies, Inc +1 (800) 605-7964 [email protected] NB-SB-MADBNI-090622 www.netbraintech.com