IDC Spotlight: Performance Monitoring of the Network Edge

Extend visibility, exert control, and enhance digital services.

Spotlight Performance with blue background and locks

The importance of the hybrid workforce continues to drive technology innovations at the remote edges. Visibility gaps in these locations are a subject of a new IDC Spotlight report by Mark Leary that takes a deep dive into the need to monitor the ever-changing network edge to assure quality performance and end-user experience.  

The last few years have seen significant increases in digital transformation activity, with more workloads moving to the cloud, increased deployment of SD-WAN, and adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) applications, all supporting a hybrid workforce. Assuring project success with quality performance and user experience throughout these migrations and upgrades has proven to be a challenge.    

The changes over the last several years have revealed that complexity is greater, the edges are essential points in the networking infrastructure, and visibility is key to monitoring and troubleshooting performance and user experience.  

Consider the reality of members of the hybrid workforce doing their job as they connect to a corporate accounting application hosted in the private data center. Regardless of whether they use VDI (for example, Citrix) or VPN to connect, they experience slowdowns, or they can’t get to the application. The remote user immediately blames Citrix or VPN and files a trouble ticket. Troubleshooting this is complex! Network operations (NetOps) has to figure out if the issue resides with the employee’s home network, the ISP to the house, the WAN to the private data center, Citrix or VPN, the data center network, or the application server farm. Multiply that complexity by the number of remote users complaining about a problem at the same time. Lacking enterprisewide visibility, it takes a major effort to rule out each of the areas of that hybrid workforce ecosystem.

In his Spotlight report, Leary, research director of network analytics and automation at IDC, provides several points of consideration when extending visibility and exerting control for success of the digital infrastructure. He highlights a survey—IDC’s “Future of Enterprise Resiliency and Spending, Wave 2,” from March 2022—which highlights responses from 796 IT professionals that indicated 34 percent felt there was “insufficient automation and analytics to effectively optimize infrastructure and workload performance across clouds, edge, and data centers.”

“Monitoring the Network Edge: Extend Visibility, Exert Control, and Enhance Service” shares details on both the challenges and best practices for optimizing the enterprise edge. Successfully overcoming the complex digital infrastructure to assure hybrid workforce quality of experience requires driving more efficiency and effectiveness in visibility and network management.

To explore more on this topic, download the IDC Spotlight “Monitoring the Network Edge.”