how were two major global brands able to maintain ... · how were two major global brands able to...

1How Gap and Fuze Monitor Performance Across SaaS Apps at Scale

How were two major global brands able to maintain performance visibility as they leverage an ever-growing number of SaaS applications across hundreds of remote sites? In this webinar, networking leaders at both brands partner with AppNeta and ONUG to discuss how they overcame their biggest problems to delivering visibility at-scale.


Both of these brands have fairly large, complex networks that they monitor and manage. The Gap maintains a large enterprise WAN to ensure internal and retail staff can run the business and grow customers, and Fuze operates a performance-critical collaboration suite used by multiple different Enterprises, usually over networks it doesn’t control.


Fuze has been an AppNeta customer since 2012, but about two years ago the relationship changed from using AppNeta as an internal solution to one that Fuze rolls out to customers during onboarding for continuous performance monitoring. Gap, on the other hand, started working with us almost two years ago to monitor core data centers and campus locations, along with a few pilot retail stores.


The Gap leverages more than 800 (and growing) apps across it’s massive global network, with offices across the US, EU and Asia. They leverage AppNeta primarily for capacity testing to help analyze bandwidth and throughput for new sites, while our Route Analysis feature is helpful during regular network troubleshooting.


Fuze originally started using AppNeta internally to gain visibility into the performance of virtually all their network components, including routers, switches, firewalls, SD-WAN, troubleshooting and deployment pre-go-live for customer readiness.

Now, Fuze has integrated AppNeta into their deployment process, helping their customers ensure their networks are robust enough to support Fuze’s UCaaS solutions optimally without impacting other workflows leveraging the network.


What made AppNeta the ideal performance monitoring solution for the needs of these brands is that the platform has always been designed with scalability in mind. There is a dependance now on multiple segments of LAN, WAN and Internet connectivity, as well as reliance on third-party SaaS providers that host many business-critical apps -- not to mention that many businesses are moving to cloud providers like AWS, Azure, IBM, etc. in general.

When balancing all of these different considerations and stakeholders, there can be gaps in legacy management strategies when network monitoring solutions aren’t deployed.


When mapping out a strategy to juggle all of these variables to performance monitoring, teams need to keep a few key considerations in mind: The first is looking at network changes before, during, and after a transition to baseline what your network is capable of today, and will need tomorrow. The second is balancing the priorities of IT and productivity with business needs, and at the end of the day, how you’ll assure the end user experience across your networks. Lastly, and certainly not least, is measuring performance ongoing to ensure end-user experience.


The core to success, we’ve found, is to focus your monitoring around these 3 key themes.

Fuze emphasizes these key themes at several phases of their product deployment -- in the pre-go-live process to ensure customer network readiness (2-4 weeks before a customer actually has to pay for Fuze services), during the POC process,

The Gap emphasizes these themes and leverages AppNeta heavily as part of their change-management validation process, ensuring new tools, users and locations can be deployed without ever leaving network management teams blind to potential issues.


One way that we look at the timeline of a deployment at AppNeta is as a clock. Starting at 12 there is actually a fair amount we can do before a project even kicks off.


Start by baseline performance over the network of certain apps or, if we take SD-WAN as an example, even before deployment, which is made easy using the traffic analysis tool. With that baseline in hand, teams can get a good picture of what the network is lacking to avoid disrupting end-user experience once deployment kicks off.


During the deployment AppNeta can validate that the architecture is functioning as expected.


But all too often we see IT get blamed for perceived performance issues after a rollout even if it has nothing to do with the newest tech. With comprehensive visibility into every action and reaction that takes place during deployment, IT can justify their strategy (or at the very least pinpoint the cause of failures, and speed up resolution).


As networks scale, teams aren’t often given additional time or resources to figure out how to balance network agility, end-user experience, security, and the strategic initiatives necessary to keep pace with the enterprise. This means that teams need to prioritize what their most important goals are in any kind of tech overhaul.

For The Gap, the goal is to meet the core technology requirement and deliver exceptional end-user experience, first and foremost. If end users are served by the new technology, and they experienced minimal interruption in the process, they consider any rollout to be a success.

For Fuze, delivering a faster time-to-value to customers and ensuring Fuze isn’t deploying solutions on incompatible networks has been invaluable. Customers see them as trusted partner because they bring additional insight into end customer networks that they didn’t have before.


Gap recently built a real-time dashboard using data from AppNeta, which shows latency between Gap campuses, supply chain locations and data centers, as well as cloud environments. All of this data — from loss/latency/RTT to App/SaaS Usage was already available on AppNeta Performance Manager, whose easy-to-use API helped Gap build an effective dashboard in almost no time.

To deliver IT productivity, Fuze actively tracks uptime matching against SLAs, keeps tabs on outages and leveraged proactive alerting for support tickets. As a result, support ticket escalations are down 40 percent internally from last February.


Observability is another key theme to tackle and that ONUG has been working on to help build. This maturity model describes the steps enterprises can take to evolve their network monitoring. Starting at Layer 0 where we have what we’d think of as traditional monitoring and escalating to a future state of self-optimization and automated remediation.

This is important for Fuze, as a service provider, because a top complaint they hear from customers is “how come you didn’t tell us there was a problem in the first case?” Being able to leverage Observability pre-deployment and during operation has been a major selling point for prospective customers.


To wrap up, let’s dive a bit deeper into how AppNeta functions: We combine passive monitoring (consisting of traffic analysis and packet-level data) with active synthetics for both the network path and applications that are critical to your business. The combination gives users the unique ability to correlate data sets for faster issue resolution to ensure better end user experience.


AppNeta is continuously monitoring and innovating on the network insight provided to enterprise customers. To learn more about our comprehensive, lightweight approach to delivering actionable network insights, download our whitepaper, Four Dimensions of Network Performance Monitoring.

https://www.appneta.com/resources/whitepapers/4-dimensions-of-network-monitoring/

https://www.appneta.com/resources/whitepapers/4-dimensions-of-network-monitoring/

how were two major global brands able to maintain ... · how were two major global brands able to...

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