NFD26: NetBeez Update

NetBeez?presented at?Network Field Day 26?(NFD26):

I?recently blogged?on the NetCraftsmen blog page about NetBeez, in the context of similar tools and what stands out about NetBeez. This blog will focus more on what’s new in NetBeez.?

I’ve been a fan of NetBeez for a while. The sensors are small (compact) and relatively inexpensive, so instrumenting your network with more than one agent per site and with WFH agents is economically feasible. Furthermore, the NetBeez team is sharp and keeps adding functionality fairly quickly.?

At present, the management portal is hosted on separate servers / VM’s for each customer, for security / simplicity. I asked about scaling. NetBeez has a customer running 1700 desktop agents, and can handle more capacity-wise. Overall, I’m told there are multiple 100,000’s of deployed agents.?

IPv6 is not currently supported but is on the roadmap.?

One way NetCraftsmen has used NetBeez agents in the past is to position one at the Internet edge and another deeper into an office. That demonstrated that there was little different, so the WiFi and LAN onsite were not the source of slowness. The cause turned out to be the connection to zScaler, likely exceeding the tunneling capacity of the small edge Cisco router.??We also were able to use one to check a CEO’s WiFi non-disruptively, by using a WLAN NetBeez and discovering that the nearest AP wasn’t operating on the 5 Ghz band for some reason (fixed by reboot, but due to criticality, we swapped it with another AP).?

The key point here is that the small form factor lets staff easily carry one or two NetBeez around and use them to troubleshoot.?

What Is NetBeez?

NetBeez sells monitoring agents along with a managed control / reporting portal (which you can do in-house if you prefer). Some of the competition has gone with virtual agents, some assembly required. NetBeez is available in multiple forms, physical, virtual, containers, and workstation-specific agents for Windows and MacOS.?

What the agents do for you: Synthetic traffic monitoring providing the following benefits:

The NetBeez WFH agent provides statistics about the WFH environment (link condition, WiFi quality, and workstation performance metrics like CPU and memory).?

Recent Announcements

NetBeez helpfully provided a summary of recent announcements / new features. New code releases are done quarterly. The most recent ones:

• 2021 1st?Quarter: WiFi metrics on the WFH agents, and jitter and MOS estimation
• 2021 2nd?Quarter: ECMP path analysis (“smart traceroute”), remote WiFi packet capture
• 2021 3rd?Quarter: More PC (workstation) performance monitoring, ISP grouping of measurements

The following illustrates the ECMP multi-path visibility (Path Analysis):

Reporting

To give you a feel for NetBeez, here’s a screen capture of a dashboard summarizing the status across several agents (note the upper right corner).?

And here’s a per-agent view showing the tests it is running and the results (orange = not so good). Note the agents listed along the left-hand side.?

I realize some of these screens are similar to the recent NetCraftsmen blog about NetBeez. The difference is the #NFD26 screen captures do reflect slightly more of a corporate multi-agent deployment.?

Multi-Path Sample

Here’s a screen capture of the latest multi-path display.

WFH Diagnosis

Here are some screen captures for WFH diagnosis. The first shows signal strength for the chosen SSID among those discovered.?

And next, a view showing the health of the various WFH agents:

Conclusions

NetBeez agents can be a very handy thing to have in your bag of tricks, either as a company-wide synthetic monitoring solution or as a handy supplement to other tools.?

For full coverage and live demos showing the capabilities in more depth, please watch the videos online! Check out the recording of NetBeez’s presentation along with prior presentations (e.g. NFD24) – see the Tech Field Day page with all the prior content posted about NetBeez (Tech Field Day page for NetBeez link below).?

Key Links

Key links for more information:

• NetBeez?Company Website
• Tech Field Day page for NetBeez
• NFD26 playlist?on YouTube

Links to #NFD26 video recordings of NetBeez:

• NFD26:?NetBeez APIs in Action: Custom Dashboards and Integrations?featuring?Panickos Neophytou
• NFD26:?How NetBeez Empowers the Help Desk to Support WFH Users?featuring?Panos Vouzis,?Stefano Gridelli
• NFD26:?NetBeez 2021 Product Updates and Path Analysis Demo?featuring?Stefano Gridelli

Comments

Comments are welcome, both in agreement or constructive disagreement about the above. I enjoy hearing from readers and carrying on deeper discussion via comments. Thanks in advance!?

Hashtags:?#NetCraftsmen #CiscoChampion #CCIE25years #NFD26

Disclosure statement

Twitter:?@pjwelcher

LinkedIn:?Peter Welcher