TNO077: From “Is It the Network?” to Continuous Assurance with NetBeez (Sponsored)

Scott Robon (0:10)

Welcome to Total Network Operations, the podcast for all packet delivery personnel.

Our mission is simple here to bring up great ideas in modern NetOps. I'm your friendly neighborhood podcast host, Scott Robon. And today I have Stefano Gridelli of NetBeez with me. Stefano, could you just give us a little introduction and tell us what motivated you to found NetBeez?

Stefano Gridelli (0:32)

Yes. Hi, Scott, and thank you for having me here.

Yeah, I'm Stefano Gridelli. I'm the co-founder and CEO of NetBeez. And the reason why we started NetBeez is because as former network engineers, we wanted to bring the user perspective into network monitoring. That is, use not just device-level information to troubleshoot issues and detect problems, but also the real user perspective.

Scott Robon (0:58)

So I'd love for you to tease that out a little bit. You know, I love talking to product folks who come from a real network engineering operations background. What gave you the motivation to do this? Like, what kind of problems did you see in your career that said, you know, I can really do better at this?

Stefano Gridelli (1:16)

Yeah, absolutely. I realized that detecting and troubleshooting user-reported outages, which then sometimes were real outages, sometimes were not.

Sometimes the user had a better viewing to the network performance and the status of the applications than the monitoring tools that the average enterprise uses. And so we decided to, you know, flip the script and monitor the network from the user perspective instead of from the kind of network perspective to really complement the information that tools like SNMP or NetFlow tools give us about the performance of the network and the applications.

Scott Robon (2:00)

And by focusing on the end user perspective, you have a pretty broad scope of endpoints, right? You're wired, wireless. Tell us a little bit about, like, what's in scope for what you're looking at.

Stefano Gridelli (2:13)

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the scope also started from a little of our history. Initially, we started monitoring why the network remote offices with the small plug-and-play sensors. This was the time, 2013, when the Raspberry Pi started hitting the market and being pretty kind of getting into the mainstream, at least for passionate kind of developers like us.

And then we introduced Wi-Fi sensors around 2015, 2016, to also gather information about Wi-Fi client performance. And then, in 2020, we released, due to COVID, also, the Remote Worker Agent, which are lightweight software clients for Windows and Mac. So you can collect the same information you did before when users were working at offices, but from their home networks or remote locations.

And so that, oh, go ahead, sorry. No, so we have a very variety of options to really cover kind of different network locations and situations.

Scott Robon (3:16)

I mean, so I definitely connect with the operational problem here. Early in my career, I have very painful, vivid memories of being responsible for network architecture and operations for a very large enterprise was one of the baby bells. And I had to play, some people called me the mayor of Chesapeake Complex, where I had to go and talk to different user groups about what they were doing and seeing all sorts of application performance problems and begging different application groups. So could you wait until we do this network upgrade? Can you hold off? Or maybe delivering all this video training via X windows is not the best way to do this. And that gives you my age, 30 plus years ago.

I developed a horrible attitude of, you know, boy, if we didn't have users, we wouldn't have any network issues. And of course, that is the wrong perspective.

So I think you felt some of the same pain. Tell me, tell me what, you know, the workflow issues that you you started seeing and say, okay, we need to think about this differently.

Stefano Gridelli (4:31)

Yeah, absolutely. And probably the situation is very familiar to many of our of your listeners that, you know, a trouble ticket, a support ticket hits the helpdesk with, you know, complaints about application being slow. And perhaps from the infrastructure side of things, including the dashboard, everything looks green. There are no real reported problem or issues with the network and the applications. And then the ticket started being kind of bounced between teams without real kind of identification or fault isolation. And we really want to kind of bridge that gap because generally, if remote users have problems, it could also include things like the Wi-Fi connection, could be the ISP or Wide Data Network connection, could be DNS, could be VPN. So there are many more situations that could lead to a degradation from the user perspective. And so we really want to complement infrastructure data with user perspective data.