Overcoming 3 Observability Challenges at Remote Locations

It is truly amazing how much digital transformations have changed networking and information technology over recent years. As many organizations are bringing employees back to corporate offices full-time (this includes headquarters, regional, or remote locations),  the performance of networked applications and services at every location is essential to the success of these initiatives. Poor user experience will quickly equal poor employee productivity, and this can quickly impact your business’s bottom line.

Three major hurdles face IT organizations in achieving performance and availability goals:

1. Many applications have moved out of the data center where long-standing monitoring was in place and into the cloud that, in most cases, is out of corporate IT control.
2. These services are accessed by remote site users (employees) via wide-area network (WAN) connectivity into which corporate IT has no visibility.
3. Many remote locations lack skilled IT professionals that could help when local users experience problems.

Here’s a closer look at each of these hurdles.

Lack of Visibility into Performance of Applications Moved to the Cloud

Virtually every enterprise has some cloud-based applications on which their employees and users in remote offices rely. In fact, the recent “2024 CDW Cloud Computing Research Report” revealed that 45 percent of the responding organizations had migrated half of their applications to public clouds. Because most of the traffic from remote offices to these applications will not go through the corporate data center, troubleshooting problems quickly and maintaining quality user experience can be challenging.

Consider the following examples:

• When employees experience problems with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) applications, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, Teams, or Zoom, existing monitoring tools in a data center will not see that traffic because it’s going from the remote offices to the hosting vendor’s environment. As a result, users may struggle to have quality voice calls, participate in conference calls, or handle customer interactions.
• Consider critical business applications that may have moved to the public cloud. Here too, the traffic is between your end users in remote locations and that cloud-based application, which bypasses the private data center. When users are unable to perform key business transactions such as reviewing customer records, checking inventory or shipping data, or inputting manufacturing specs for production in a factory, the business will be impacted.
• Some technologies, such as virtual private network (VPN), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Domain Name System (DNS), and authentication services have been pushed out to colocation sites to be closer to users in remote offices. Again, the employees access these directly, and the path does not go through the private data center. The inability to get access to corporate network and application resources will impact healthcare medical offices trying to access patient records, retailers trying to restock inventory from warehouses, and investment firms trying to access commodities research—all of which is bad for the business.

IT organizations don’t have the control to quickly address employees’ problems with applications and services in the cloud because they don’t control the environments in which the services are hosted. Although the vendors may have targeted tools to track their performance in their environment, such tracking will merely rule out a part of the communications path that your remote users’ transaction takes; it doesn’t pinpoint the true source of problems.

Lack of Visibility and Control into Application Performance over WAN Connections

Assuring performance, availability, and user experience with services in the cloud from remote offices is complicated. This is because communications between all the distributed locations and the cloud environments require access via third-party vendors for internet or WAN connectivity.

Problems involving WAN connectivity may mean it is difficult to tell why a user in a remote office is unable to log into the corporate VPN through a server at a colo—is it the Wi-Fi network at the remote office, the WAN connection, the colocation site, or the VPN server itself? With multiple points of failure plus multiple vendors involved, time is lost to vendor finger-pointing, while the source of the problem is still in question and users are unable to get to the application services they need to do their job.

Again, the IT and NetOps teams are missing control of a key part of the communications path that impacts performance, availability, and user experience.

Lack of Skilled IT Resources in Remote Locations

Each remote location may have its unique characteristics, such as different types of employee jobs—some with customers or patients and others without, some on Wi-Fi and others using Ethernet—all contributing application traffic to the network. However, they are all at risk for the same business-impacting problem: poor experience with network or application services.

The third observability challenge is that most remote locations lack skilled, on-site IT professionals, leaving centralized IT and NetOps teams responsible for rectifying problems. When issues occur impacting these offices, there are obviously multiple possible failure points. NetOps organizations need eyes and ears locally to evaluate network issues, application performance, and user experience disruptions to assure quality and availability.

Given these challenges, the one place over which IT has control is observability across the network from their organization’s remote locations. And that is where the issues impacting employees are experienced.

It simply makes sense for observability strategies to include coverage at the remote business edge to monitor, in real time, all the application traffic into and out of the locations for troubleshooting analysis and quick resolution to these everyday issues.

Vendor-Independent Observability

NETSCOUT’s nGenius solution provides observability enterprisewide, including your remote locations. nGenius takes an ecosystemwide approach that is vendor- and infrastructure-independent and scales to the needs of your data centers as well as your remote locations.

By focusing on real-time, end-to-end visibility powered by deep packet inspection, you have the necessary solution to see what’s really happening in your network, even in remote sites. It’s not about drowning in data; it’s about turning the right data into actionable insights that can address the challenges you face assuring performance, availability, and user experience at the remote business edge of your enterprise.

Are you ready to see how NETSCOUT can deliver observability for your remote locations? Visit our website to see how one organization has benefited from adding observability to its remote locations.

    
To learn more about remote site observability, watch our webinar.