Observer Platform innovations from Viavi enhance visibility across users, applications and the cloud
Viavi Solutions have announced significant enhancements to the Observer Platform allowing IT teams to further maximise network availability, productivity and compliance. The enhancements include critical new capabilities in End-User Experience (EUE) scoring, digital certificate analysis, application identification, Unified Communications (UC) support, and Azure traffic visibility through NSG flow log analysis.
The Viavi state of the network study revealed enterprises’ top challenges in managing their networks. With a majority of enterprise applications hosted in the cloud, fewer than 1% of organisations say they are satisfied with network visibility. Problem domain isolation – pinpointing issues across network, server, application, or client domains – remains one of the biggest challenges for NetOps teams. End-user experience is the highest ranking KPI. And nearly half of teams spend between 10 and 20 hours per week troubleshooting UC platforms.
The latest Observer release, v18.17, addresses these challenges to improve reliability of networks in meeting organisational objectives. Major new enhancements include:
· EUE Scoring Updates. Observer’s patented EUE analysis now provides deeper insight into each problem domain – network, server, application or client – clearly showing individual scores and associated deductions, making it easy to understand what is contributing the most to performance degradations.
· Traffic Visibility for Azure and AWS. With the introduction of NSG flow log support, Observer adds insight and visibility for Azure environments equivalent to the existing capabilities for AWS using VPC Flow Logs. As Microsoft does not natively support packet extraction, flow visibility is essential for troubleshooting issues within complex Azure environments.
· Enhanced Application Recognition. Through added Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and Application Identification (AppID) capabilities, the Observer Platform now recognises thousands of specific business and non-business applications natively without having them embedded or hidden within HTTP or HTTPS.
· UC Call Visualisation. Observer is now the only platform in the industry to transform both packet and flow data into intuitive, actionable visualisations that follow the journey of calls through the network infrastructure and identify the location and root cause(s) of poor UC performance.
· Digital Certificate Analysis. Running servers with non-compliant or expired certificates is a risk, especially if affected hosts and services are public facing. Certificate analysis enables a proactive approach to take timely action, prevent negative outcomes, and safeguard networks and reputation.
“Applications are now distributed across private data centres, multiple public clouds, and edge locations, yet many companies fail to upgrade their network monitoring and management solutions to keep pace with these highly complex environments,” said Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Viavi has recognised this shift and responded by providing comprehensive visibility across these distributed, heterogenous environments. The Observer platform has evolved to support these new environments and its emphasis on end-user experience should appeal to enterprise customers looking to accelerate their transformation, enabling greater operational efficiency and ensuring positive end-user experiences.”
“In partnership with our customers, we have levelled up performance and threat visibility and developed a powerful set of capabilities that provide insights where they are needed most,” said Chris Labac, Vice President and General Manager, Network Performance and Threat Solutions, VIAVI. “Our patented End-User Experience Scoring can now be used by virtually the entire IT team to effectively identify, prioritise, and remediate business-impacting issues. Our UC visualisations are now the best in the industry. New DPI and Azure capabilities round out a release that we are thrilled to deliver. Our focus continues to be not on delivering more KPIs, but delivering more clarity, actionable information, and business value.”
