AppNeta announced enhanced monitoring capabilities for Equal-Cost Multipath (ECMP) networks.

This improves the ability for large, enterprise customers to gain active visibility across all ports and protocols on their networks.

ECMP is a routing technique that enables traffic sharing the same source and destination to be distributed through multiple network paths of equal weight. Modern, resilient architectures are designed to provide critical business services via multiple, independent methods so that if one service delivery component is degraded, the other elements of the same service are not impacted.

The challenge with this approach comes as a side effect of its resilience: Multiple, independent services could mean that one user’s experience may be severely degraded, while others are completely unaffected, which standard monitoring solutions might be blind to.

This latest advancement to AppNeta Performance Manager allows customers using ECMP techniques to have visibility into all possible routes the traffic may be distributed across. As part of active network monitoring, AppNeta performs network route discovery with TCP, ICMP and UDP, during which it uses techniques to discover all possible network paths that could be traversed. Now, AppNeta’s network path monitoring can leverage that understanding of the paths to actively measure performance down any or all possible routes in the ECMP environment, restoring critical visibility into the performance delivered by each circuit.

“In the past, large enterprises who wanted to employ ECMP to gain network bandwidth and resiliency did so at the expense of proactive visibility into the myriad of potential paths. Not anymore,” said AppNeta CEO Matt Stevens. “Our 4-Dimensional approach to enterprise-class performance monitoring can actively monitor across all possible routes when organizations deploy ECMP. Enterprises no longer have to make the false compromise of performance over visibility.”