Symantec Edge SWG Performance Monitoring

For today’s network operations teams, optimizing both network security and performance is
more vital than ever. However, meeting these objectives keeps getting more difficult.

Business services continue to rely on increasingly complex, dynamic, and multi-cloud network
environments. In these environments, it gets ever more difficult to authoritatively track and
manage performance and ensure security policies are consistently adhered to. For teams
running secure web gateways (SWGs), also referred to as proxies, these challenges can be even
more pronounced.

Understanding Symantec Edge SWG Processing Performance

Symantec Edge SWG (formerly ProxySG) runs on premises, and is available on either a physical
or virtualized appliance. When teams are running Edge SWG appliances, they can be challenged
to understand what specific internal services may be affecting performance. The solution’s
advanced policy engine and sophisticated rules can introduce processing overhead, which
comes at a cost from a performance standpoint. Most teams can benefit from additional
visibility into the details of this processing.

Where Traditional Monitoring Falls Short

Within most enterprises, teams have been leveraging traditional monitoring solutions to track
various network devices, such as proxies, firewalls, and routers. These tools support tracking
device availability (up/down), CPU utilization, memory, sessions, and other types of aggregated
statistics.

While traditional monitoring approaches are necessary to gain visibility into the health and
status of devices that comprise the network, they don’t provide a complete and holistic view.
More specifically, traditional monitoring solutions lack in-depth visibility into Edge SWG.
Fundamentally, they lack the ability to get in-depth statistics on overall processing performance
of the appliance and on the performance of the specific modules within it.

Implications of a Lack of Visibility

Since teams lack visibility into the overhead added by the solution, whenever network issues
arise, the Edge SWG platform is often erroneously viewed as the cause. This presents a number
of problems. Fundamentally, if the Edge SWG is erroneously blamed for an issue, teams may
not continue the effort needed to find the real root cause. Further, if a problem isn’t correctly
understood, the proposed “solution” may do more harm than good.

The Broadcom Solution

Broadcom now delivers a complete solution that enables you to gain comprehensive
observability in your Edge SWG deployments. With this solution, you can establish concrete
baselines and leverage insights for optimally managing your entire Edge SWG estate. The
solution features two key elements:

• AppNeta. AppNeta provides active synthetic network and application testing, delivering rich metrics based on path, packet, web, and flow data.
• DX NetOps. DX NetOps offers comprehensive network monitoring for traditional, software-defined, and cloud-based architectures. DX NetOps provides unified visibility, high scalability, and advanced analytics.

With the Broadcom solution, teams can validate overall performance of Edge SWG, monitor
capacity and health, and gain detailed visibility needed to troubleshoot issues. With this
solution, organizations can fully leverage their Edge SWG investments and boost operational
efficiency in managing their complex network environments. All customers who are running
current versions of Edge SWG can harness the Broadcom solution.

Conclusion

To achieve their organization’s availability and security imperatives, today’s teams can’t afford
to have blind spots. With the Broadcom solution, teams can eliminate the potential blind spots
associated with Edge SWG environments. With the solution, teams can gain comprehensive
observability, so they can effectively track behavior, address issues, and optimize performance.
To learn more about the advantages and use cases of the solution, be sure to visit our blog
post, “Symantec Edge SWG Performance Monitoring: Gain Full Observability with DX NetOps
and AppNeta.”