By Paul Davenport, AppNeta
Since the start of the pandemic,
troubleshooting last-mile and general WFH performance issues has become a
monster task for enterprise IT teams, who in the past had mostly managed
performance across commercial-grade connections that they largely controlled.
Along with the very real performance
roadblocks and bottlenecks along the network path that could impact end-user
experience in a work-from-anywhere environment, there are just as many trivial
mistakes causing network blackouts that are very much in the end-user's
control.
Here's one example: As many families can
relate, it's been a full house for one member of our team-an Advanced
Technologies team leader based out of Vancouver, British Columbia-whose
son-in-law lives in the basement and recently began regularly complaining about
Internet performance.
As a company that sells a network performance
monitoring solution geared to WFH, we deploy our own native Workstation
monitoring technologies out to user devices so that we could both keep tabs on
the efficacy of our own network connections while constantly testing/improving
our solution internally. As an engineer, this particular employee also had a
traditional enterprise monitoring point that monitored network performance for
the entire household.
Our team member looked at their network
performance into and out of their Monitoring Point and all appeared OK; our
performance dashboards clocked some standard jitter, latency, and data loss
over a period of roughly 2 hours, but nothing that would indicate network
blackouts to the entire household.
Next, our team member set up monitoring from
his son-in-law's wireless laptop and saw terrible performance across the board
Once our team member was able to isolate the performance issues to a specific
IP target, he went and checked the router only to find one of the three
antennas was loose by one full turn.
After tightening the antennae and checking
AppNeta's performance dashboard, performance immediately went up.
This example dovetails with a larger trend
we're hearing from customers that enterprise IT teams are now being leveraged
as an educational resource for navigating at-home performance issues. For many
enterprise IT, this is a serious time drain on at least two fronts.
For starters, enterprise IT teams historically
manage commercial-grade connectivity between headquarters and remote or branch
offices. As a result, residential connections are one of at least four new error
domains that enterprise IT teams now have to gain visibility into to get to the
root of performance issues in a WFH setting, which include:
- Home environment (Are they
wireless? Are they wired? Are there other people working in the household? Is
there remote education as well?)
- User's Last-mile ISP (or
enterprise ISP in that case)
- Whatever the mid-path is (ie.
Comcast peers with Level 3 -- is it there?)
- The cloud-based environment or the
enterprise infrastructure
Not only does this new environment multiply
the footprint for potential error, but providing this educational resource on
best practices for WFH connectivity is stretching IT even thinner at a time
when their scope has never been wider.
For instance, users may have too many
devices running, multiple people competing for resources, or they may even be
experiencing the limitations of stealing a neighbors WiFi. This last example
was the root cause of another real-life customer struggle, as one customer
wrestled with understanding chronic performance issues out to a remote user who
failed to own-up from the get-go that they weren't leveraging their own
residential WiFi resources, but a shared connection provided by their neighbor
that was prone to major capacity swings.
Lessons are still being learned every day about how to
contend with our new work-from-anywhere reality and all the potential mishaps
that can derail end-user experience in an instant. But as users continue to get
comfortable with their new work settings, they will increasingly expect better
performance of apps and networks from wherever they log onto the network,
calling for a more agile and scalable enterprise IT going forward.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Davenport is
AppNeta's Marketing Communications Manager. Paul has a background in tech
journalism, content marketing and public relations in the B2B space, with a
focus on cloud, cybersecurity and networking technologies. He studied Print
& Multimedia Journalism at Emerson College.