Apcela Launches its Enhanced Analytics Platform™ (EAP) with SD-WAN API

Machine Learning Enables Enterprises to Aggregate, Analyze and Automate Network Performance in Real-time for
Intent-based Remediation

Apcela, the high-performance application delivery company, announced the launch of its Enhanced Analytics Platform™ (EAP), the company’s first move into machine learning. Built for complex enterprise IT environments, EAP assesses real-time event and metric-driven data between networks, applications and tools, bridging the gap between data silos due to limited analytics, while addressing enterprises’ need for dynamic, predictive, automated analysis across networks. This launch debuts EAP’s critical enabler, Apcela’s Cisco SD-WAN/ELK EAP API. Operating on Apcela’s global ultra-high performance, low-latency backbone, this API leverages and extends the power of the Cisco SD-WAN solution with Elastic’s ElasticSearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK). The net result is a powerful solution empowering IT teams to reduce the time it takes to diagnose and remediate network incidents, thereby accelerating application performance.

In Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics, NPMD vendors have had to contend with key shifts in the environments they are attempting to monitor, such as “Migration toward cloud-hosted workloads and applications fundamentally changing the flow of network traffic.” In addition, Sanjit Ganguli, Research Director with Gartner's IT Systems, Security and Risk research group, et al., noted that, “Exponential growth in application and infrastructure dynamism and complexity is forcing network instrumentation as the key piece of the visibility puzzle.”

“Apcela is addressing these challenges head on with an analytics platform that integrates real-time data across the infrastructure and application layers,” said Mark Casey, CEO of Apcela. “Our Enhanced Analytics Platform is working to accelerate remediation of network performance issues before they can lead to application performance issues.”

As the first SD-WAN solution supported by Apcela’s Enhanced Analytics, the Cisco SD-WAN/ELK API adds SD-WAN data to the platform, enabling significant reductions in time to diagnose and resolve network performance issues arising from fluid application requirements. While the Cisco SD-WAN deployments offer some log retention in the vManage portal, data visualization and analytical capabilities are limited due to static data sets. Apcela’s Enhanced Analytics Platform addresses these issues by integrating SD-WAN data with other network operational data and systems logs for correlation and analyses. ELK enables immediate support for third-party components including, but not limited to, Amazon AWS, Cloudflare, Oracle, Palo Alto, vmWare, and zScaler.  Because Apcela delivers core networking capabilities, it delivers performance improvements significantly faster than similar solutions disaggregated from network delivery.

“The top barriers to cloud analytics and automation are insufficient data quality, integration of disparate tool sets, and the learning curve associated with advanced analytics required to resolve performance issues between networks and applications,” noted Jack Dziak, President and COO of Apcela. “Apcela’s Enhanced Analytics addresses these challenges in one easy-to-launch, single pane of glass, as-a-Service offering.  Our Enhanced Analytics Platform provides the enterprise with the means to deliver improved applications performance in a highly-agile manner, providing deeper integration between networks, applications and other systems elements traveling across networks.  EAP accelerates the realization of hybrid IT benefits,” Dziak added.