CHALLENGE
The forced transition to work-from-home (WHF), due to the 2020 pandemic, added an additional challenge to our customer’s application performance: the home network and its connection to the internet. Many workers found that their home networks were not as predictable as at-work networks, and the staff was often unprepared to fulfill their “new role” as a network administrator at home.
A combination of factors made it incredibly difficult for enterprise networking teams to monitor at-home workers’ application performance.
These included:
- The large numbers of individuals who were now working from home
- The plethora of consumer-level WiFi/wired routers and their limited configuration control
- Most of the network paths involved were not under the control of the enterprise networking team
- Traditional network monitoring tools didn’t apply to a WFH environment
- Applications were delivered via a mixture of an enterprise data center, private cloud, and SaaS
Strategy
Our customer asked NetCraftsmen to help identify application performance problems. The solution needed to scale quickly to hundreds of at-home workers. Application performance needed to be measured right from the client workstation, taking into account the client network, the ISP, and the internet path to the applications. To provide a full picture, it also needed to capture information about the client’s local network connection—things like a duplex mismatch, link errors on wired connections, or poor WiFi signal strength and drops. With the scale involved, it needed to highlight the clients with the worst application performance, so the team didn’t have to dig through hundreds of individual reports.
Solution
We determined that a digital experience (DX) monitoring tool would be the easiest and best method to gain essential visibility into all the factors we knew could affect application performance. Prior experience with a routing problem between two remote ISPs led us to select Catchpoint, a DX monitoring system. It features a browser extension that can measure web-based application performance. We also installed the client-side application to capture wired and wireless network interface data essential to diagnosing local network problems.
NetCraftsmen then deployed Catchpoint’s system in the client’s environment and analyzed the results. The data revealed some surprising and some not so surprising causes.
Result
The NetCraftsmen team immediately found several problems and provided directions to the client’s employees to fix them. The ultimate result was the improvement in remote employee productivity without overwhelming the client’s network team. NetCraftsmen worked to quickly identify and validate problems, and provide solutions the client’s network team could implement easily.
The deployment’s highlight was helping a key staff member whose applications were performing particularly poorly, especially real-time applications like video meetings. The client-side network analysis showed that the individual’s laptop had poor WiFi receive signal strength, indicating that the laptop was not communicating with the WiFi router very well. The individual was initially skeptical because the local WiFi network had been in place for some time. Temporarily replacing the WiFi network connection with a wired connection was the next step. The application problems immediately disappeared. The client’s team then put in place a plan to improve the team member’s home WiFi network.
NetCraftsmen has people with experience and expertise to solve challenging problems. We know the technologies to apply to specific problems, and we understand the processes required for the successful application of those technologies. You can Rest Assured® that we can solve your challenging network problems. Contact us to see how NetCraftsmen experts can help you.