Everything Is Green, Yet Users Are Complaining
This situation will sound familiar. The Network Operation Center NOC isn’t aware of any problem, and the dashboards are green, yet the help desk is receiving user complaints. The problems are escalated to the network team, which has limited data to find the root cause.
Remote users pose a particular challenge for IT teams that rely solely on infrastructure monitoring. These tools are designed to monitor routers, switches, access points, and other network devices. They provide limited visibility into what users actually experience.
The adoption of cloud, SaaS applications, and remote work has made this visibility gap more apparent. The good news is that network experience monitoring can fill the gap between what the infrastructure reports and what users experience.
What Infrastructure Monitoring Tells You
Infrastructure monitoring tools verify the status and performance of network devices. This is a basic requirement of an enterprise network monitoring strategy. These tools monitor devices across the infrastructure and alert IT when a device or service fails.
Infrastructure monitoring generally report metrics such as:
- Device and interface availability
- CPU and memory utilization
- Interface errors and bandwidth usage
- Server and service health
- Routing, firewall, and other device status
However, confirming that individual components are working does not provide enough information about the user experience. That is why a NOC may be unaware when a user at a branch office is experiencing Wi-Fi connection issues or when a remote employee cannot reliably use the VPN.
Without user-experience data, a NOC is limited to a reactive approach that depends on user complaints. The modern workforce expects reliable digital experience to perform its job. When applications are slow or unstable, productivity and morale suffer.
What User Experience Monitoring Tells You
User-experience monitoring shifts the perspective from inside the infrastructure to the locations and endpoints where users work. Agents that continuously run tests and collect measurements to verify that the network and the applications are performing properly.
These agents can be software clients installed on laptops or standalone hardware or software probes deployed in office and cloud environments. From these vantage points, they can verify Wi-Fi connectivity or test how remote employees reach business-critical applications through a VPN.
The resulting performance data enables NOC teams to answer questions such as:
- Is Wi-Fi quality sufficient for reliable connectivity?
- Can users reach the application through the corporate network, internet, or VPN?
- How long does the application take to respond?
- Is packet loss or latency affecting performance?
- Is jitter affecting voice or video calls?
Complementing infrastructure monitoring with user experience monitoring helps move incident management from a reactive approach to a proactive one.
| Infrastructure monitoring | User-experience monitoring |
| Monitors devices and interfaces | Monitors from user locations and endpoints |
| Measures CPU, memory, bandwidth, and errors | Measures DNS, latency, loss, jitter, HTTP, Wi-Fi, and VPN performance |
| Asks: “Is the infrastructure healthy?” | Asks: “Can users successfully use applications?” |
| Identifies component failures | Reveals degraded user experiences |
| Primarily infrastructure-centric | User- and application-centric |
Availability and Performance Are Not the Same
Everyone understands that availability and performance are not the same thing. Availability represents the percentage of time a device or service was online during a given period. Performance describes how well that device, network, or service operated while it was available.
Infrastructure monitoring tools include performance-monitoring capabilities, such as CPU utilization, bandwidth usage, interface errors, and memory consumption. The limitation is that it can be difficult to map these device-level metrics to application performance and user experience. This is especially true because each application has different performance requirements.
A network administrator may set device-performance thresholds that are not relevant to a particular application. User experience monitoring addresses this limitation by running tests against applications and applying application-specific performance requirements.
A practical example
Consider a branch office where users begin reporting that a cloud-based business application is taking several seconds to load. The monitoring dashboard shows that the router, switches, WAN connection, and application are all available. Interfaces are up, utilization appears normal, and no critical alarms have been triggered. From an infrastructure perspective, everything looks healthy.
Tests performed from the affected location, however, tell a different story. They reveal intermittent packet loss, unusually slow DNS responses, and an increase in HTTP response time. None of these problems is severe enough to make the application completely unavailable, but together they create a noticeably poor experience.
The infrastructure is technically up, yet the application is not performing well enough for the people trying to use it.
Measurements That Help Explain the User Experience
Measuring the user experience requires collecting multiple metrics from the endpoint, its wireless or wired connection, the internet or the corporate network path, and the application itself.
On an endpoint, CPU and memory utilization can help determine whether the device has enough resources to support the user’s workload. If the user connects over Wi-Fi, an agent can collect signal strength, link quality, roaming events, and connection times, including how long it takes to get a DHCP address.
From a network perspective, it is important to measure latency and packet loss across different sections of the path. Tools such as traceroute and path analysis can provide information about the route between users from applications. This is especially important for remote users whose traffic crosses external networks that the IT team does not manage.
Jitter is particularly important for voice and video calls. High jitter can cause distorted audio, frozen video, and dropped calls. It should be detected and investigated.
Moving up the network stack, application-level testing adds another layer of information. It is important to evaluate both DNS and HTTP performance. DNS response time shows how quickly an application name can be resolved, while an HTTP test can confirm not only that an application is reachable, but also how long it takes to respond.
Together, these measurements help explain the experience of users working from offices, branches, homes, and other remote locations.
Why Network Teams Need Both Perspectives
To gain a complete view of their environment, network teams need both perspectives. Infrastructure monitoring tools are necessary for monitoring the health of network devices, but they cannot show the entire user experience.
User experience monitoring complements these tools by showing how the network affects users and applications. When a user reports a problem, the combined data helps determine whether the root cause is the network, the application, or the endpoint.
Conclusion
Ongoing digital transformation requires network teams to monitor not only the infrastructure, but also the performance of applications and the experience of remote users.
Infrastructure monitoring tools are necessary for detecting network failures, but healthy devices cannot serve as proof of a healthy user experience. NetBeez complements infrastructure monitoring by continuously testing network and application performance from the locations and endpoints where users work. This gives network teams visibility into the experience that traditional device-health dashboards cannot provide.
