How can ThousandEyes improve the home/remote worker experience?

We’re spending more time at home now than ever before. As the pandemic proved we can do more offsite than we’d ever thought, many companies are ditching the expensive offices. And that’s great for the modern worker who values that extra flexibility which working from home can provide. But what about their IT performance. Home networks were never designed for the loads we’ve seen in 2020 till now. How can ThousandEyes improve the home/remote worker experience on those home networks? What about user error or hardware problems your IT team will never see in person. There are options and we’ll explore them.

 

Remote troubleshooting

Sometimes the fix is simple. It’s just a setting or configuration issue that an in-person IT team would have up and running in moments. With ThousandEyes, there’s an agent that can run on that homeworkers PC, allowing you that visibility. ThousandEyes states, “Monitoring user SaaS and internally-hosted app experience and correlating it to underlying network connectivity, including WiFi, ISPs, and VPN gateways, will enable IT teams to isolate and triage performance issues.” With this data, IT teams can walk a user through a range of fixes to troubleshoot any problems they are facing, all remotely. This is particularly helpful if you have hundreds or thousands of remote employees.

SD-WAN config

Companies are supplementing their MPLS connections with broadband. But this causes issues because the internet is less secure and reliable than MPLS. ThousandEyes has been helpful for IT to get insights about the SD-WAN deployments because otherwise IT managers are responsible for the SD-WAN experience with no way of monitoring it. So, by combining Cisco’s AppDynamics technology with ThousandEyes, you can efficiently manage that growth from 10 branch offices to 10,000 – even if each branch is just one worker. You can still have the correct configurations, monitoring and security in place as if it were an on-site connection. And everything can be tracked from the cloud.

Monitoring the experience

With so many interconnected systems that aren’t company-owned but impact company performance, monitoring them has taken centre stage. ThousandEyes states, its tech can:

• Find issues with the LAN, WiFi, ISPs
• Check connectivity and performance of VPNs
• Scan UX for SaaS and internal apps
• Eliminate employee troubleshooting
• Identify and escalate external issues with the root cause
• Reduce network team MTTI, MTTD, and MTTR
• Verify KPI of SaaS and internet performance
• Validate app-level issues for internal stakeholders
• Monitor CDNs, DNS, DDoS mitigation and public cloud platforms for availability and performance issues

In this way, ThousandEyes helps companies take control of the user environment, even for remote workers. It can serve to root out issues with interdependencies and form a solid business case for tech improvements. Lastly, it removes the responsibility for troubleshooting from the employee and puts it back into the IT team’s hands.

Have a few questions about how ThousandEyes can improve the remote workers experience for your team? Let’s talk.