Netrounds is a Swedish company that makes software to help service providers and large enterprises validate network performance and availability by combining active testing and monitoring in one product.
If you haven’t heard of Netrounds, you’re not alone. I first became aware of them at Networking Field Day 20, where I was a delegate and Netrounds was a presenter.
Enterprises and service providers have myriad choices to keep tabs on their networks and services. Netrounds differentiates itself by combining active testing and monitoring in one product.
Are We Up?
Netrounds’ value proposition is pretty straightforward: provide software that actively verifies that configured services are up and working as they should be. That’s in contrast to having a customer or end user raise a ticket because of poor or unavailable service.
Netrouds takes the perspective of an end user or client to test a service. The company uses agents to send traffic across the data plane to gather metrics. These agents can be run in a VM or a container, and get deployed in data centers, campus network, and branch and remote offices. Agents can also run in the big three public clouds: AWS, Google, and Azure.
Agents can test a service by communicating with one another, or to external resources. Test results are sent back to a central controller. Operators can review test results via a GUI, as well as manage and orchestrate the agents.
The company aims to be comprehensive, with test agents available for:
- The wireless access layer to measure things like signal strength and interfence
- The wired connection in branch and campus environments
- The branch/campus edge, including service chains
- The WAN, including SD-WAN
- The data center and public clouds
Agents can measure UDP and TCP performance, video quality, and VoIP. For VoIP, Netrounds agents include a full SIP stack and can perform synthetic voice calls and provide MOS scores. It also includes a full suite of tests for Internet performance including DNS response times, HTTP requests, latency and jitter, and ICMP.
Feeling Validated
Netrounds says its testing tools are fully automatable, so that organizations can program testing into regular operations.
For example, if a service provider stands up a new service, or makes a configuration change, the network team can then check the service, or validate that the change was implemented and the service is functioning as intended.
Netrounds makes REST APIs and Netconf APIs available for integration with third-party systems.
You can get more details about Netrounds’ architecture, and see live demos of the software, courtesy of Networking Field Day.
Note: If you’re blogger or podcaster who covers IT, the folks at Tech Field Day are always looking for new delegates. Tech Field Day has events on networking, storage, cloud, security, and wireless. Why not hit them up?
Disclaimer: Tech Field Day paid for my travel and accommodations to attend NFD20. They also provided snacks. I received no compensation or remuneration of any kind from Netrounds, and neither Networking Field Day nor Netrounds had any expectation of blogs, podcasts, or other coverage from me.
