Would You Rather Have Mole Vision or Eagle Vision for VPN and VDI Environments?
Whether you use a virtual private network (VPN) to connect your computer to the corporate network or use virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to connect you to a virtual computer within the corporate network, both play a critical role in keeping remote workers connected and productive. Both VPN and VDI also reduce the panic, anxiety, and stress on security operations professionals because they do not have to manage or worry about nonsecure remote access. Unfortunately, corresponding network operations professionals don’t get the same relief or warm and fuzzy feelings, because they must manage VPN and VDI performance—often blindly.
Remote users expect the same connectivity and access experience from their home office as they do when are in the corporate office. Organizations don’t have the luxury of having their remote workers frustrated, unproductive, and demotivated because they can’t get what they need to do their jobs. The good news for those workers is they don’t get blamed when they can’t get their work done because of the “network” or the “application” or the “computer.” The bad news for IT network operations professionals is that they do get blamed for exactly this scenario.
Well, unless you were born yesterday—and if you were, congrats on the superior reading comprehension skills—you’ve already received a lot of sage advice on visibility. “Keep your eye on the ball” may have been the earliest lesson. “Use your mirrors and check your blind spots” is something any licensed teenaged driver has heard at a variety of volume levels from parents and loved ones. And of course, there’s everybody’s work favorite: “You can’t manage what you can’t see.”
Ramp Up Your Visibility
The point is visibility matters. But not all visibility is the same. There’s a good Visibility Without Borders video that summarizes it well. Visibility is a must-have necessity for VPN and VDI planning, ongoing operations and monitoring, triage, and rapid troubleshooting. NETSCOUT provides seamless contextual workflows for troubleshooting and triaging VPN issues belonging to an ISP, or internal IT, in a vendor-neutral manner. We can also monitor next-generation VDI and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) protocols such as Citrix EDT and PCoIP. The meaningful metrics we generate in real time from monitoring VPN and VDI environments are used to rapidly accelerate problem resolution and restore high performance to lessen impacts on remote users.
Our packet-based perspective provides a level of unmatched visibility. For example, we can see into usage, active sessions, and transport issues that impact VPN performance, including which VPN protocols are in use, numbers of remote users connected, bandwidth consumption in volume or packets in and out, packet loss, responsiveness issues, and setup failures, to name a few. On the VDI performance side, we provide visibility into VDI transports such as Citrix ICA and the interaction of network and infrastructure components on which ICA relies, inclusive of quality of service (QoS) setting, latency, and availability. The critical, 100 percent accurate, unimpeachable packet-level visibility NETSCOUT provides is the information IT professionals desperately need to rapidly discover and pinpoint the root cause of the problem so that it can be fixed quickly.
Learn from the Problem Solvers
NETSCOUT Principal Sales Engineer Jeff Hauk, in “Solving Visibility Challenges into VPN and VDI Environments,” part of our Problem Solvers Series, delivers a great presentation on the importance of packet-level visibility for VPN and VDI environments. Hauk shares sanitized screen shots from real customers illustrative of the illusive “before and after” pictures professionals use to accelerate problem resolution. Full disclosure: He makes no mention of either moles or eagles in his discussion, but he clearly shares compelling reasons why packet-level visibility into VPN and VDI environments is something that no one should do without if they want to keep remote people connected, productive, and working.
Get unmatched visibility into your VPN and VDI environments with NETSCOUT.