Working remotely is becoming the norm for more and more businesses. Many companies have offices spread throughout the world, decentralized employees or contractors, or they simply have a flexible work from home (WFH) policy.
Remote work is an aspect of digital transformation that is often left out of conversations when it comes to ensuring business continuity and driving growth. This is especially true in terms of monitoring the infrastructure that makes working from home possible because many of our work from home capabilities rely on third-party, cloud-based solutions and services that we don’t control.
Regardless, having the right infrastructure monitoring in place will propel decisive action during critical moments, maintain business continuity and productivity, and ultimately, deliver a consistent customer experience. LogicMonitor’s remote monitoring solutions can help businesses avoid at-home frustration and take third-party application availability into their own hands.
LogicMonitor and Work From Home Infrastructure Monitoring
LogicMonitor has always focused on extensibility, fast ROI, and contextual intelligence. Our SaaS, agentless platform offers out-of-the-box DataSources and dashboard widgets to provide visibility into key work from home solutions. Our intelligent monitoring helps ensure that your remote workforce is driving business performance and maintaining your customer experience.
LogicMonitor offers pre-configured dashboards that show performance and health in real-time for:
SaaS Applications (e.g. Zoom, Office 365, Slack)
Voice-Over-Network (e.g. Cisco VoIP)
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (e.g. Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops, VMware Horizon)
Virtual Private Networks (e.g. Palo Alto VPN, AWS VPN, Azure Virtual Network Gateway, GCP VPN Gateway, Pulse Secure)
Zoom Slack Office 365 Citrix Palo Alto AWS GCP
We also make it easy to roll up technical work from home performance metrics into an overall executive dashboard, providing the ability to understand, in real-time, how your remote workforce is driving productivity.
In addition, the Remote Session feature provides a secure way to remotely access monitored devices. Remote sessions are enabled via the use of Apache Guacamole, a clientless remote desktop gateway that requires no plugins or client software.
An Action Plan for Ensuring Work From Home Infrastructure Reliability
Every solution will be put under performance strain during peak periods. While working remotely or managing remote team members, a service interruption of one of your third-party services can cause a domino effect, knocking down any chance you have of being productive. But you don’t need to have blind trust in your vendors and risk a negative impact on your team. Having an action plan in place is the best way to ensure business continuity and reduce loss in productivity.
Identify the Business-Critical Tools and Services You Need for an Effective Remote Work Strategy
For most businesses working remotely, communication solutions and services are paramount for success. Whether this is a video conferencing tool (e.g., Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, etc.), VoIP provider, or other collaboration applications (e.g., Office 365), you should start by understanding what services your business relies on to get work done.
Monitoring the Availability of Your Business-Critical Tools
Your teams need to know when their applications and tools are going to be accessible so they can plan accordingly. It should not be up to each individual team member to check the status of these third-party tools and communicate their temporary inability to work. By having a centralized dashboard of the availability of your business-critical tools and services, you can communicate interruptions and help set expectations for your business.
Take Swift Action to Keep Your Business Running Smoothly
We’ve all experienced losing time when our video conferencing service is experiencing issues. This could be a problem due to the high bandwidth utilization on your company’s VPN, or it could be an outage at a third-party provider. Regardless of the issue, communicating this information widely, thanks to centralized monitoring, allows your team to save valuable time. If you have a meeting scheduled for 3:30 PM, but the video conferencing service you use is having issues at 3:20 PM, you can quickly notify everyone to use a different conferencing service or reschedule the meeting.
Manage VPNs For Decentralized Access
For many employees working from home, VPN availability is required to access specific tools or portals such as an internal intranet or GitHub. If your VPN is down or lagging, engineers may not be able to connect to the servers to fix critical issues right away.
Engineering teams aren’t the only ones who rely on your VPN. However, some teams might not know when they should or shouldn’t be connected while working, thus causing extra strain on your bandwidth. By monitoring VPNs and having the historical trending data, you’ll be able to assess if non-VPN essential employees are lowering bandwidth efficiency for your on-call or international teams. If that is the case, then there are measures you can take on your VPNs, whether you use Palo Alto, AWS, Azure, GCP, or others.
Video-Free Afternoons
Are you finding that there is high bandwidth utilization through your VPN everyday between 2:00 PM and 5:00 PM? Understanding bandwidth allocation and utilization might be the root cause of why so many calls or videos are freezing. For distributed teams, the solution can be as simple as having certain times where it is recommended to turn off your video for meetings. Nevertheless, you will only be able to make these decisions if you are monitoring your VPN in the first place.
We hope these dashboards and tips help you monitor your infrastructure with ease while working remotely. If you are already a customer, you can check out our library of dashboards here. If you are new to LogicMonitor, you can try our platform for free or book a demo.
Tony Albanese
Sr. Manager, Product Marketing
Tony Albanese is an employee at LogicMonitor.
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