The network is down again. Or maybe the cloud is running slow today. How many times have we heard these phrases used in our environments? How many times have we said them to users in the hope that they will stop bugging us about problems that we have no visibility into or method of troubleshooting?
Part of the issue with modern end user IT experiences is that so many components that determine the overall health and usability of the application or suite are far outside of our control. Even for on-premesis applications there may be components being pulled from cloud storage or online locations that introduce latency and make users ask why everything isn’t running at peak performance. And even the best monitoring tools out there can’t give you visibility into something that is off the local site. And cloud monitoring systems are designed to show you what’s going on in the public cloud, not inside your own network.
Observation Day
Enter Viavi ObserverLive. This new product gives you the visibility that you’ve been missing in your hybrid IT environment. ObserverLive gives you visibility into the AWS public cloud as well as your own environment through both hardware and software options. It also aids your technical staff in troubleshooting and gives them the data they need to keep user experiences happy and productive.
ObserverLive can be configured to monitor online application suites like Microsoft Office365 and Adobe Creative Cloud. Both Microsoft and Adobe have been pushing users into their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings for the past few years. But when these SaaS portals are down or slow the productivity in the office is down as well. IT professionals need to be able to see when there are issues with these services. And they need to ensure that these issues are with the SaaS systems themselves and not with the local network connection.
ObserverLive also allows you to test the connection to these SaaS portals from your own environment as well with a dedicated hardware appliance or a software virtual machine as well. These systems connect back to the ObserverLive platform running on AWS and help organizations test their own connectivity to the cloud services they rely on. They also help developers for these organizations build their own synthetic tests to ensure that any applications that are built and migrated to the public cloud can be monitored as well as they would be on-premesis.
The other key piece of technology available through ObserverLive is their troubleshooting agents. This is huge when you have users that you can’t quite figure out their issue with their system. Maybe they’re a remote worker in a branch office or a telecommuter. Maybe they only have the issue during a specific time of the day or on a specific piece of hardware. ObserverLive gives you the opportunity to push an agent to the remote workstation and start collecting information for troubleshooting purposes. Once installed, the agent can run tests to any one of a number of services to find out what’s causing the issues and report the results of those tests back to your IT teams to figure out how to handle the situation. And the best part? The remote user doesn’t have to do anything at all. The process is totally transparent to them.
Bringing It All Together
Network monitoring is giving way to application monitoring now that SaaS is the new rage among application vendors. You need to know how your environment is behaving at all times and you can’t accomplish that with basic technology. You need a solution that lives in the cloud and knows the way around the globe to truly understand how your users are perceiving their application functionality. ObserverLive gives you what you need to make that happen for your users. Thanks to Viavi, you can get the data you need to let everyone know exactly why things aren’t working like they want them to.
