AppNeta

The entry of cloud has opened up a new world of opportunities for enterprises with its high flexibility, computing power, and performance capabilities minus the exorbitant costs. However, despite its unparalleled potential, there is something that is often overlooked. Since the applications running on the cloud are hosted beyond an organization’s own network, in a third-party’s infrastructure, organizations using the applications don’t have visibility or control over their performance. Also, the rising trend of remote working is adding to the woes because applications are being used at locations beyond the direct and centralized reach of an organization. So neither an application’s point of hosting nor its point of consumption is under an organization’s purview. In such scenarios, traditional network monitoring applications fail as they only look into the user’s infrastructure. “The basic snapshot of a user’s infrastructure that these traditional solutions offer doesn’t really explain the actual performance of the application. Since day one, our vision has been to offer enhanced visibility into networks to provide organizations with crisp and clear actionable insights about application performance,” explains Matt Stevens, Chairman, President, and CEO of AppNeta.

Based in Boston, AppNeta provides proactive network and end-user performance monitoring solutions with a focus on remote/branch offices. The platform enables IT and network operations teams to measure and manages the performance of their business critical applications wherever they are in use. The 100% SaaS-based platform is completely deployed, managed, and updated AppNeta, and is available either as a multi-tenant public cloud or a dedicated private cloud offering. “Every dimension of the process is performed by our dedicated experts. Customers can simply log into the platform and experience the exceptional network monitoring intelligence from AppNeta,” adds Stevens.

AppNeta’s solution is comprised of three primary components—Delivery, Experience, and Usage.

‘Delivery’ is a network path-based solution that focuses on the underlying L2 - L4 health of the multiple end-to-end networks used to deliver any–all the way from wherever an application is hosted, including SaaS and public/hybrid cloud applications, to the end user. This patented approach leverages an active methodology to provide light-weight, continuous performance monitoring and SLA validation. It includes an AI-driven root-cause engine to pinpoint both the location and reason behind performance issues to drastically reduce MTTR and false positives. The second component, ‘Experience’ is all about quantifying and doing near real-time, consistent measurement of the end-user experience of web-based applications from the end user’s location. “We measure the end-user experience to understand web-based application performance and break that down into the core components of server, network and client. We then go deeper to understand the impact of how third-party plug-ins and DNS resolution time impacts overall end-user experience.” says Stevens. Lastly, through the ‘Usage’ component, the platform delivers pure packet-based performance visibility to automatically discover which applications are in use at a given location, which users are running them and reports per-app and per-user performance metrics. Usage has a built-in deep packet inspection (DPI) engine to automatically recognize and classify over 2,000 applications and can be extended by customers to cover internally developed applications too.

Due to the broad reach of the SaaS-based offering and the enormous amount of unique data being captured and processed daily, the platform recognizes broader performance patterns across locations and provides deeper insights to notify end-users based on the insight derived from other users of the service.

Stevens points toward an instance wherein AppNeta assisted one of the largest hospitality companies in the world in monitoring applications in use across their numerous remote locations, which again depend on connections from many different internet service providers. AppNeta was deployed as a pilot program in around 50 client sites and was able to seamlessly monitor the client’s network in all the locations. Today, AppNeta is working on expanding its services to the rest of the client’s 6000 locations.

Though a large part of AppNeta’s focus today is on North America, the company does provide solutions to organizations in over 80 countries worldwide. In the long run, AppNeta’s focus is on making their products smarter and more automated by adopting technologies such as machine learning, and artificial intelligence.