How Zero Trust Is Changing Network Monitoring

Zero Trust has become the defining model for securing modern enterprise environments. By verifying every user and every connection, organizations have reduced the attack surface and improved data protection. But as this model reshapes how and where users connect, it’s also transforming what NetOps teams must do to keep networks observable, efficient, and resilient.

The goal of Zero Trust is clear: remove implicit trust and ensure that access decisions are made continuously based on identity, context, and risk. Yet achieving this level of control often means routing traffic through cloud-based secure access services, private application gateways, and encrypted tunnels.

For NetOps, that’s where the new challenge begins: while the network may be more secure, it’s also less visible.

The Growing Reliance on Zero Trust

In distributed enterprises, Zero Trust is the operational default. With a workforce that’s increasingly mobile and applications that live in multiple clouds, organizations are relying on Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) models and cloud security brokers to manage access.

Platforms like Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) and Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) now sit at the center of many enterprise architectures. These services handle the user-to-application path; they encrypt, broker, and secure traffic that used to flow directly across corporate links.

From a security standpoint, this design works. But operationally, it means NetOps teams are losing sight of how users actually experience the network. Traffic that once passed through enterprise routers and firewalls now enters a cloud edge, traverses Zscaler’s backbone, and connects to SaaS or private applications. Traditional monitoring tools often only see the entry and exit points, not what happens in between.

That loss of visibility has major implications. Performance issues become harder to diagnose. Finger-pointing between teams increases. And even when a problem is found, the supporting data—flows, logs, or packet traces—may be fragmented across systems.

The Visibility Challenges for NetOps Teams

NetOps feels the operational impact of Zero Trust in several specific ways:

1. Limited insight into brokered sessions: Because secure access platforms like Zscaler encapsulate and encrypt traffic, conventional monitoring tools can’t easily inspect or map those connections. This creates blind spots in end-to-end visibility.
2. Fragmented telemetry sources: NetOps teams are now dealing with data from on-prem devices, cloud VPCs, identity brokers, and SaaS platforms, each with different formats and collection methods. Correlating them manually takes time and expertise.
3. Longer mean time to resolution (MTTR): Without unified observability, resolving user complaints often requires cross-team escalations. Determining whether an issue is on the LAN, the cloud edge, or the access broker can take hours.
4. Monitoring gaps across hybrid environments: As workloads and users move dynamically between data centers and the cloud, maintaining consistent coverage becomes increasingly complex.

Why Network Observability Is the Next Step

To address these challenges, many organizations are expanding beyond traditional network monitoring toward true network observability: a model built to correlate, contextualize, and automate insight across hybrid and Zero Trust networks.

Observability brings together flow data, cloud telemetry, and context like users, devices, and policies into a unified operational view. Instead of relying on isolated metrics, it reveals the why behind performance and connectivity issues.

Plixer One’s flow-based architecture makes it ideally suited to this shift. From the start, we designed the platform to unify data from routers, firewalls, and cloud environments into a single analytical model. With the latest 19.7 release, it now extends that visibility into Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) and Zscaler Private Access (ZPA, giving NetOps teams end-to-end context across secure access and brokered paths.

This combination of architectural flexibility and new Zero Trust integrations allows teams to:

• See performance across encrypted, cloud, and on-prem segments.
• Troubleshoot faster using correlated, flow-based evidence.
• Validate that Zero Trust policies are working as intended without adding new monitoring agents.

How Plixer One 19.7 Expands Visibility into Zero Trust Environments

Plixer One’s19.7 release represents a major step forward in supporting these new operational realities. The update introduces native integration with Zscaler, providing visibility into ZIA and ZPA traffic that was previously hidden behind brokered connections.

By ingesting telemetry from Zscaler’s Nanolog Streaming Service, Plixer One converts those sessions into enriched flow records that align with on-prem and cloud flow data. This allows NetOps teams to monitor user activity across the entire path, from local network to broker to destination, all within a single interface.

With this integration, NetOps can:

• Identify latency or policy enforcement points within Zscaler paths.
• Correlate Zscaler sessions with internal and external network flows.
• Validate that Zero Trust routing is performing as intended.
• Investigate incidents without requiring access to multiple dashboards.

Together, these improvements make Plixer One a central platform for understanding performance and security in Zero Trust networks without compromising the encryption or privacy principles those networks are built on.

Building an Operational Strategy Around Observability

NetOps teams that succeed with Zero Trust monitoring tend to follow a few best practices:

1. Instrument everywhere traffic flows: Collect flow or log data from routers, firewalls, cloud gateways, and access brokers to ensure comprehensive coverage.
2. Correlate, don’t duplicate: Bring diverse data sources into one observability layer instead of relying on multiple, disconnected dashboards.
3. Focus on cause, not symptom: Use topology views and flow tracing to find the true point of failure, whether it’s a congested WAN link, a broker routing issue, or a misconfigured policy.
4. Automate where possible: AI-guided workflows can handle repetitive reporting and pattern recognition, letting engineers focus on higher-value analysis.

By building observability into their operational workflows, teams can turn the complexity of Zero Trust into actionable visibility.

A Unified Path Forward

Zero Trust has made the network more secure, but also more complex. For NetOps, maintaining visibility now requires a shift toward tools and processes that unify data across every access path.

Plixer One 19.7 embodies that approach, transforming encrypted and brokered sessions into meaningful insights, and giving teams a single platform to monitor performance, validate policies, and resolve issues quickly.

With unified flow data, guided investigations, and new integrations like Zscaler visibility, NetOps teams can regain control of an increasingly distributed network and keep users connected securely and efficiently.

See Everything New in 19.7

Plixer One 19.7 is a huge update and Zscaler integration is only one of the features we’ve included in the release. To find out more about the integration and the other new features Plixer One users now enjoy, check out the webinar replay.