Resolve network and VPN performance issues with Endpoint Monitoring

IT professionals are now adapting to remote environments and learning to manage a distributed, homebound workforce. In recent conversations with IT pros, many have cited that connectivity/VPN and home network issues are their top challenges but they lack the visibility to diagnose and troubleshoot these problems.

Catchpoint for employee experience monitoring gives IT teams what they need: visibility from remote users’ devices to any business-critical application across any network. They can monitor the underlying network connectivity of the user’s home WiFi and upstream broadband ISPs, in correlation with the tunneled network of the VPN overlay connection.

In this blog, we discuss a recent incident that was impacting the employee experience of an enterprise workforce. The customer relied on Catchpoint Endpoint Monitoring to quickly resolve the issue.

Employee Experience Monitoring In Action

An IT team from a global enterprise needed to manage common issues related to supporting the growth of their remote and geographically distributed workforce. They were dealing with issues related to bandwidth, VPN capacity, WiFi performance, etc. The team lacked visibility into the network and application which made root cause analysis complicated and time-consuming.

Using Catchpoint, the IT manager could check the employee experience score in real-time. The experience score is an aggregate of the network, endpoint/device, and applications/services scores.

Knowing that any issues related to application, network, or endpoint can impact the score, it is critical to be able to see how each component performs over time. On a particular day, this same global enterprise experienced a score drop. They quickly determined that the problem was isolated to only a few users and the rest of the workforce was not impacted. In the dashboard below (Fig 1), you can see that the problem is isolated to specific users:

They investigated the issue further by drilling down to a specific user. Packet loss had negatively impacted the users’ experience with Microsoft Teams. The Catchpoint visualization below (Fig 2) indicates packet loss occurring immediately after the user’s initial connection to the VPN tunnel and from the corporate network to the Microsoft Teams application.

The data visualization in Fig 3 highlights a positive network and user experience score – there is a significant difference in latency and packet loss.

Fast-track Troubleshooting With Endpoint Monitoring

“We just installed the Catchpoint Endpoint Monitoring on our machines, logged into our portal, and it was already reporting the data we needed.”

Ultimately, the issue was determined to be the VPN Connection. For a specific group of users, the VPN connectivity was poor based on the user-centric network path analysis. To resolve the issue, the team set up additional VPN concentrators in a region closer to the end user location. The network score improved resulting in a positive experience score. We can see that the improved network score in the dashboard below (Fig 4).

Watch this video to learn more about troubleshooting employee experience using Catchpoint.

This post was co-written by Neelum Khan and Zach Henderson