How to get native end-to-end visibility for SASE with autonomous digital experience monitoring

As organizations rapidly undergo digital transformation and cloud migration, managing user digital experiences will undoubtedly define their success. Yet organizations are struggling with the infrastructure complexity that this rapid change has brought about, which has a tremendous impact on a user’s digital experience. At the end of the day, your users don’t care if the latency between nodes on your network is operating under some predetermined threshold. They care that their Zoom call is stable and their Gmail is responsive.

In speaking with many customers during my time here at Palo Alto Networks, I’ve been consistently hearing about how their IT teams are struggling when it comes to monitoring the digital experience of their end-users and resolving problems when they arise. What they tell me tends to revolve around three key issues:

1. Lack of visibility - Truly understanding digital experience requires the correlation of performance metrics across many technology domains including endpoint devices, WiFi, LANs, internet links, VPNs, firewalls, cloud, and application servers. Most existing monitoring tools only cover a fraction of these domains, and they require deploying additional agents or appliances.
2. Lack of access - Existing monitoring tools don’t have access to in-path infrastructure, especially in SASE environments. This means significant portions of the delivery path are opaque, making it challenging to pinpoint the root cause of digital experience problems.
3. Lack of control - Existing monitoring tools can’t take action to remediate problems, because they don’t control the delivery path, placing a significant burden on operational teams to manually resolve problems.

We believe there is a better way to ensure a great digital experience to your users than what the current monitoring tools in the market offer. Today, at the Palo Alto Networks Ignite ‘20 conference, we described our vision for Autonomous Digital Experience Monitoring to deliver native end-to-end visibility into SASE environments. Our goal here is simple. We want to provide a seamless mechanism for IT teams to deliver the best possible digital experience to their end-users. 

How exactly will we do that? By delivering:

1. Segment-wise insights - Because we provide SASE infrastructure, we have the unique perspective for observing all delivery path segments from the user to their apps. This isn’t possible using external monitoring tools that can only observe the infrastructure from the outside in.
2. Real and synthetic traffic analysis - This goes far beyond merely collecting performance metrics from infrastructure elements and instead focuses on correlating real-world data from user activity and data from synthetic testing.
3. Autonomous remediation of digital experience problems - Because we control key segments of the delivery path, we can actually take corrective action when we identify a problem that might impact a user’s digital experience.

Introducing Prisma Access Insights

We are proud to announce our first step along this journey with the general availability of Prisma Access Insights. With Prisma Access Insights, administrators gain deep visibility into their SASE environments without the need to deploy additional agents or appliances. This helps ensure that end-users have a seamless digital experience from any device and in any location. Best of all, it’s free for all existing Prisma Access customers who can simply access it via the Palo Alto Networks Hub.

Originally released as a public beta back in August, almost 70% of our Prisma Access customers have already tried the new Prisma Access Insights capabilities and provided us with their feedback. We have been blown away by the response, which clearly highlights the need for Autonomous Digital Experience Monitoring in the industry. While the general availability is a big milestone, we look forward to working closely with our customers to continue enhancing the capability to ensure they can deliver the best possible digital experience for their users. Ready to get started? Learn more about Prisma Access and take a test drive. Or read about our latest Prisma Access pricing and packaging model and new professional services offerings.