5 Areas to Consider: NETSCOUT Visibility for Business Growth and Remote Offices

Supporting enterprise business growth requires high-level performance in several areas of the business—sales, manufacturing, and customer service, as well as the corporate IT network and applications. A clear and robust network and application performance management and visibility strategy helps ensure the technology behind your business is operating effectively and delivering quality user experiences.

Digital transformations today have become more complex across organizational infrastructures, increasing the importance for vendor-independent instrumentation and packet-level visibility at essential business and network edges, from headquarters and data centers to remote offices, contact centers, colocations, and beyond. As technology continues to evolve rapidly, cloud adoption is no longer a train onto which organizations are jumping: The train has left the station. According to a recent Tech Report article, as of 2023 “every single organization either uses a public cloud or a private cloud,” with “85 percent of firms anticipated to embrace a ‘cloud-first’ strategy by 2025.”

While organizations have embraced the cloud, network and application performance issues have become more of a challenge for companies lacking the visibility needed to continuously assess performance and user experience at remote offices. Swift, efficient troubleshooting when issues arise in the cloud or at colocation sites, impacting critical supporting services post-migration, is critical, but pinpointing the root cause of the problem across several vendor environments is enormously difficult and time-consuming.

5 Critical Areas to Consider for Improving Your Visibility Strategy

As enterprises grow and operations expand, leveraging an independent, vendor-agnostic performance monitoring solution is essential for obtaining real-time performance insights across various infrastructures and supporting remote sites in dispersed locations. Here are five key areas that organizations with remote offices should consider for improving their performance monitoring strategy to support growing business needs and to deliver quality user experiences from virtually anywhere:

1. Third-party applications: When we think of applications that are essential to daily productivity, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) applications often come to mind— for example, Zoom or Microsoft Office 365—that allow employees at remote sites to collaborate effectively. Monitoring user experience with business transaction tests from remote locations helps to maintain performance with third-party solutions and provides early warning if those technologies begin to degrade.
2. Business applications: Remote offices depend on many essential business applications, such as those used for payroll management systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), project and portfolio management, customer relationship management (CRM), and more. These applications provide critical information to the workforce on a daily basis, and without them there can be serious delays in the information necessary for people to do their jobs, reducing employee productivity. Business transaction tests evaluate user experience quality with data center-based applications from remote sites and corporate headquarters. With early identification, IT teams can resolve issues before employees are impacted.
3. Capacity planning: Strategically planning equipment and/or bandwidth changes at remote sites and removing bottlenecks to support traffic influxes during peak times is vital for maintaining business continuity. Additionally, organizations can reassess costly WAN bandwidth by adding or reducing it based on cyclical usage needs. By monitoring and analyzing packet-level data to identify trends in utilization and application activity, organizations can plan more effectively for future projects to avoid performance issues and optimize their budgets.
4. User experience: Conducting routine business transaction tests to support the workforce by assessing user experience quality between remote offices/corporate headquarters and data centers, colocations, and the cloud, where application services are hosted, can help proactively identify the source of degradations before they negatively impact user experience. Early warning of changes in trended user experience can give IT teams the time needed to get ahead of performance issues and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) to preserve employee productivity, customer satisfaction, and overall company reputation.
5. Comprehensive observability: By employing a holistic, vendor-agnostic, independent performance monitoring solution, IT teams are able to assess packet-level information from a single source of truth. They can leverage synthetic testing capabilities to evaluate user experience and combine early warning with packet-level insights to streamline troubleshooting and avoid wasting hours or even days tracking down evidence from each remote site, third party, or WAN vendor. Leveraging a robust, well-integrated solution will prevent finger-pointing and eliminate the need to debate which party is accountable for network and application performance slowdowns.

NETSCOUT’s Remote Office Performance Monitoring Solutions Help Support Business Growth

NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution provides organizations that have remote offices around the world with the end-through-end visibility and deep packet inspection (DPI) at the scale needed to support growing business operations. Powered by patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology, NETSCOUT’s solutions enable IT teams to analyze trended Smart Data from InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances in a single pane of glass via the nGeniusONE solution. NETSCOUT solutions deliver visibility for superior user experience at the essential business edges where clients connect, using a combination of scalable DPI, packet-based monitoring, and synthetic testing. This enables IT teams to reduce visibility gaps and empowers them to effectively monitor network and application performance in any location as operations continue to grow.

Learn more about how this enterprise leveraged nGenius Enterprise Performance Management to monitor remote office performance and assure user experience anywhere by using packet-level visibility.