Optimizing Experience for a Secure Hybrid Workforce
The rise of remote and hybrid work has led to a mass decentralization of the workforce, with more employees than ever being able to choose where their work gets done. In order to securely connect enterprise resources—from inside the corporate WAN, through the firewall, to remote users—most workers rely on an SSL or IPSec virtual private network (VPN).
While VPNs are great at securing data and traffic for a distributed remote workforce, they can also introduce a level of complexity and opacity that makes it extremely difficult for IT to troubleshoot application and network performance issues that impact end users. Those challenges are even more pronounced when VPN sessions coincide with the use of collaboration applications, such as real-time videoconferencing, whose multi-session complexities are exacerbated by split tunnel configurations.
Addressing the visibility challenges that VPNs introduce is essential to providing exceptional user experience and application performance to anyone connecting through a VPN tunnel. However, not all VPN tunnel monitoring delivers the deep insights your team needs.
Simply providing visibility into parts of the service delivery chain is not, on its own, a solution to VPN performance issues. Monitoring VPN traffic needs to be done primarily from the end user’s perspective to fully understand the complete service delivery chain, from the local environment conditions through to the target endpoint. The VPN monitoring tool also needs to be focused on actionable correlated metrics that show, for example, how application availability, functionality, page load times, or VoIP quality are affected by factors, such as VPN loss or VPN latency. Knowing those will allow you to resolve issues for VPN users, regardless of their IP address, more quickly and ultimately enable you to move into a more continuous improvement process.
See Your VPN Service Delivery Chain From End to End
ThousandEyes provides multi-layered, hop-by-hop visibility into the VPN tunnel (overlay) and network infrastructure (underlay) so IT teams can see precisely where issues lie and work to resolve them before worker productivity is impacted.
Monitoring that goes where your end users go—from the office to the home office
- Monitor VPN connectivity and network traffic, and proactively receive alert notifications on the performance of Wi-Fi or local gateway issues.
- Automatically configure and run tests for online, available agents to ensure coverage is maintained across your distributed workforce.
- Dynamically filter results from a wide range of attributes, including SSID, location, network, and many others for granular visibility into each user and session.
- Visualize network paths to easily diagnose a sub-optimal VPN gateway or split tunnel configuration issue that may be resulting in poor end user experience
VPN underlay and overlay path visualizations enable effective troubleshooting
- Monitor user experience in correlation with the underlying network connectivity
- View a virtual construct of the VPN tunnel to isolate issues within the overlay path
- Utilize TCP testing to probe along the true path that your packets take to reach an application while maintaining your security policies
End-user vantage points for proactive insight into end-user experience
- Gain real-time visibility into the experience of SaaS and internal applications, as well as the health of underlying local, ISP, and app provider networks
- Overcome the complexities of dynamic collaboration apps that leverage split tunnel configurations. Automated Session Testing isolates individual session components, allowing you to monitor and quickly assess each overlay and underlay path in use during a session.
- Automatically collect browser data for the domains relative to your critical business applications for a real user data perspective
- Schedule tests to identify failed gateways, configuration issues, performance delays or errors across application-layer components
VPN Monitoring to Optimize Experience of a Remote Workforce
Featured Blog Posts
Expanding VPN Visibility to Support a Secure Remote Workforce
Architecting Remote Access Without Sacrificing Security
Why ThousandEyes?
Insight Into Users’ Local Environments
See how employees’ local environments are impacting their digital experience for effective troubleshooting
Clarity To Resolve VPN Performance Issues
Understand how VPN performance impacts end-user experience and work efficiently to optimize it
Visibility Throughout VPN Tunnels
Overcome VPN blind spots and quickly uncover issues within underlay and overlay paths to resolve issues
Explore ThousandEyes
Network & Application Synthetics
See how VPN monitoring can help identify issues before they impact your remote employees.