As a former network engineer one of the things I'm really tired of is being blamed when it's
a network problem. Well, one of the ways we can actually take care of that is using something
called NetPath Services which proves end-to-end that your network is clean. They're very simple
setup in Hybrid Cloud Observability, and we'll just go ahead and get started. To begin with, we'll go to
My Dashboards, Network, and NetPath Services.Iif you haven't used this before you probably only
have one NetPath service in here and that's to Google from your main polling engine. Now one of
the things I use it for is to make sure that my ISPs are being accurate and then my SAS Solutions
are online, so we have a couple in here we're going to work with but let me show you how to build one
from scratch. We'll just start with "create new service", we'll give it a hostname or IP address
for our example we'll use outlook.office365.com which is of course the front end for Microsoft
365's Outlook setup, and we're going to use port 443 for the https port we'll give it a name,
and select our probing interval and we're going to leave the probing interval at 10.
This can be moved up or down depending on the frequency you need to do this, but NetPath does
a lot of work on the back side, so you want to make sure that you give it ample time
to at least perform every single time so that's why we're going to keep it at 10.
We're going to select our probe - this can be any one of your polling engines, or you can
actually set up a new NetPath, it's just as easy as hitting the button there says
"to find a new probe", but we're going to go for our main polling engine this time,
and that's it. You can see it here down at the bottom, and because NetPath does a lot of work
it's one of the things that takes a couple minutes to spin up now I want to explain
NetPath really fast. What we're essentially doing is mimicking TCP packets from any source location
in this case our primary polling engine, all the way to an end target. Now, I specifically
said TCP I did not say web, because this can be any port, this can be port 22 for your SSH, it
can be port 1433 for SQL Server, it could be any TCP port, and what's nice about that is you can
use this between your locations and perhaps just connect to the far side router, and then you can
actually see whether the path through your NPLS cloud or your point-to-point locations or in your
basically your provider network is also clean. But I like using it for SAS because I pay for
that a lot, so let's see what it looks like. Once we've given the process sufficient time, it'll
change the status and in this case we're lucky it's green, let's look at it. We'll expand M365,
and then select from our primary polling engine, and there we go - this looks like a
lot of spaghetti but let me break down the parts for you - this is our initial probe,
this is a router where we can actually see the interface detail, this area is our internal
network and then we've handed off to our ISP, we've continued on through Microsoft, you can see here
AS8075 is Microsoft Corporation and then this on the far side is our target location. And if I zoom out
a little bit - we're green start to finish. So now we definitively know that at least from our primary
polling engine all the way out to Microsoft 365 that we have a clean network path. Now what's nice
about that is you can put these probes in each of your major locations or even put it on a laptop
that goes over VPN to make sure this works. What's also nice is in the event that you've run into
a problem, you can always set up an alert, we'll just do that real fast. We'll go to our alerts
and then manage alerts, the platform shifts with an out-of-the-box alert, so I'm just going
to look for NetPath there it is. I always like to use this one as a starting point,
duplicate and edit it, and change my trigger conditions, if we wanted to monitor the one
we just did we'll just go ahead and change this to M365 Outlook and then optionally change our
trigger actions so the trigger actions could be right of logs, send an email, send a Teams
message, something like that. But that's it, that's all it takes to customize an alert specifically
for that and that's how NetPath works using the Hybrid Cloud Observability platform.