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You need to continuously assess the end-user experience to have a complete picture of Wi-Fi performance
Key takeaways:
- Five ways to effectively monitor endpoint connectivity:
- Take an outside-in approach
- Consider the IoT
- Gather the right data
- Avoid monitoring silos
- Install monitoring agents
It's never been more critical to take wireless network monitoring a step further. You need to know how users are experiencing connections at any given moment, thoroughly observing endpoint connectivity. This kind of visibility often allows IT staff to resolve issues before the client notices by ensuring they always know how Wi-Fi is performing from the end-user’s perspective — not just the internal network view.
Making sure Wi-Fi works well is one of your most important concerns. How do you do it? Here are five ways to improve endpoint connectivity monitoring:
1. Take an outside-in approach
Many network engineers understandably focus on the internal infrastructure to watch for issues, troubleshoot, and resolve connectivity challenges—or that’s all the visibility their current tools provide. Unfortunately, this misses many problems that affect endpoints and don't show up in infrastructure-sourced telemetry.
They should obtain visibility into much more, including the specific performance of Wi-Fi for all endpoint devices. Outside-in monitoring looks at the data produced by an individual user’s machine, not just infrastructure data. Assessing this information not only pinpoints a greater range of issues but also helps you find new opportunities, such as platforms, settings, and equipment that can increase productivity.
2. Consider the IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow, with 41 billion IoT devices expected by 2027. Handling this new equipment and the Wi-Fi issues it may bring requires monitoring tools that provide visibility into how the IoT is affecting a network.
The outside-in approach provides data on how newer, smarter devices interact with the network so you can adapt. What risks do these devices bring? How do they use the internet? What kind of bandwidth do they require?
Every organization is now faced with an exploding amount of smart equipment seeking to connect like watches, thermostats, wearables, medical sensors, appliances, locks, automobiles, and many more. Effective monitoring tools can not only be deployed on many of these IoT devices for holistic monitoring—but the insights WNM provides can improve WLAN design to stay ahead of the network-design-and-upgrades curve.
3. Gather the right data
Improving endpoint connectivity also requires hard data. Without knowing the root cause of an issue, you won’t know if the problem is with a device, the network, the service provider, or a combination of these factors. There is more information than ever to gather and analyze, especially with so many employees working remotely on diverse networks. Holistic monitoring tools identify culprits accurately and avoid the blame game that causes conflict and slows down solutions.
Collect continuous network data and timestamped feedback so you can get to the source of issues, including identifying roaming and coverage problems, congestion, interference, and adapter hiccups.
4. Avoid monitoring silos
Many network monitoring tools traditionally function in detached deployments, meaning that engineers may solve an issue in one domain—like security, applications, or network—but not solve the underlying problem that affects everything.
Instead, when monitoring endpoint connectivity, you should ensure that all deployed sensor readings and other data gathered are accessible and integrated in one place to provide a comprehensive and continuous picture of network performance. Avoiding silos means you have a much better end-to-end connectivity perspective and can fix more significant problems for good.
5. Install monitoring agents
To accomplish these tasks, you need agents and sensors deployed on each key endpoint for continuous monitoring.
Mobile Eye® from 7SIGNAL allows you to install agents on all endpoints so you can diagnose Wi-Fi problems instantly. You'll be able to view performance from each user's perspective, empowering you to act before the client notices something's wrong.
You can monitor WLAN performance remotely with Mobile Eye, and the sensors are AP and device-agnostic, providing the flexibility to work with any setup. The Mobile Eye helps you uncover the root cause of a connectivity issue using user experience data, and you gain visibility into both wireless and wired network devices.
Work with 7SIGNAL for effective wireless network monitoring
The Mobile Eye is just one of 7SIGNAL’s monitoring solutions that helps you improve your network. The Sapphire Eye® uses on-site sensors that measure additional Wi-Fi KPIs and the in-depth performance of access points. 7SIGNAL’s complete Wireless Network Monitoring platform gives you enterprise-wide Wi-Fi visibility—resulting in 50% to 100% baseline network performance improvement following optimization.
7SIGNAL® is a leader in enterprise Wireless Network Monitoring. The 7SIGNAL platform is a cloud-based Wireless Network Monitoring (WNM) solution that continuously troubleshoots the wireless network for performance issues – maximizing network uptime, device connectivity, and network ROI. The platform was designed for the world’s most innovative organizations, educational institutions, hospitals, and government agencies and is currently deployed at Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Kaiser Permanente, Walgreens, Microsoft, and many others. 7SIGNAL continuously monitors the connectivity of over 4 million global devices. Learn more at www.7signal.com.