Microsoft 365 (Office 365, Windows 10, Mobility & Security) fosters a connected workplace that delivers secure, anytime, anywhere access to business-critical applications and content, across different geographic locations and workstyles. But ensuring excellent digital experience is key to achieving these goals. Riverbed SteelCentral helps IT ensure collaboration goals are met. https://rvbd.ly/2C1NEUk
In this presentation, I’ll cover how SteelCentral End User Experience Monitoring helps businesses ensure they meet their goals for improved collaboration through Microsoft 365.
<note to sales: Microsoft 365 is not the same as Office 365. See the next slide and note that Microsoft 365 includes Office 365 AND Windows 10 AND Mobility & Security solutions. Refer to the MSFT 365 web page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/home
Microsoft 365 is all about collaboration. The combination of Office 365, Windows 10, and enterprise mobility and security is meant to enable the enterprise workforce to collaborate more effectively among themselves, their partners, and suppliers, to achieve improved business results. Applications like Exchange, Skype for Business, Office productivity apps, SharePoint, Yammer, etc are all intended to improve collaboration.
The benefits of migrating to Windows 10 and Office 365 are clear – better user experience, improved security, lower operational costs, and faster upgrades. But challenges to enterprises do exist.
Windows 10 migrations can take a long time and they’re expensive. On average it can take an enterprise a year to a year and half to complete a Windows 10 migration. And migrations are expensive. Forrester estimates that enterprises will spend over $400 per user to upgrade to Windows 10.
For Office 365, Gartner estimates that at least 50% of enterprises will experience some network related performance problems and 20% will report service performance issues.
Preventing these problems from occurring and ensuring a smooth migration to Windows 10 or Office 365 can be a challenge in today’s complex enterprise environments.
Why is this a challenge? Much of the problem has to do with the siloed nature of most management tools. Most monitoring & management technology focuses on monitoring the performance and availability of the application components in the infrastructure. Application Performance Management and Systems Management tools focus on web servers, app servers, databases, and hosts. Network and Storage Management tools focus on those domains. Virtual monitoring tools focus on the hypervisor and OS resources. And Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile App Management (MAM) are focused on metrics and analytics having to do with mobile devices and apps, respectively.
The problem with this siloed approach to IT management is that it lacks the perspective of what the end-users, the workforce, are actually experiencing as they use applications to conduct business. These separate monitoring tools can all show “green” to the IT Ops team, indicating satisfactory component performance and availability, when in reality <click to advance>
The workforce is still complaining because they are experiencing slow performance on their devices when executing critical business activities, like opening an email, sharing a file, booting up, or doing a Skype voice or video call. The reason they’re still complaining despite the fact that your data center management tools show everything green, is that you can’t measure End User Experience from the vantage point of the Data Center “looking out.” You can only measure End User Experience from the End User’s perspective “looking in.” That’s the primary reason for the “Visibility Gap” – the gap between what your tools are telling you and what your users are experiencing.
Despite the billion dollar a year market for System Management tools, analysts like Gartner and Forrester estimate that 70-80% of problems impacting the end users are not detected by IT. (Forrester “IT is a Business Risk”). So if you’re in IT, you’re actually LUCKY if your users complain to you. At least you know you have a problem so you can resolve it. But what about those users who suffer in silence and don’t complain to you. That’s when the Visibility Gap becomes really painful.
And getting all of the collaboration benefits of Microsoft 365 or Windows 10 or Office 365 is hard when you have zero visibility into the impact of these changes on end user experience.
The impact of the visibility gap produces at least 8 areas of pain for IT and the business.
The top row is all about trouble shooting the problem – you’re reactive; it takes too long to interrogate the user who is complaining in order to validate the issue; you get the various IT teams in the war room and they all point fingers at one another – the network team blames the server team, who blames the app team, etc; and it simply takes to long to solve the problem.
But IT has to do MORE than just trouble shoot. The visibility gap produces pains in other areas. Such as Service Level Management – your customer sat scores sure won’t be high if you’re suffering the pains in the top row. You can’t establish SLAs that are meaningful to the business – after all, the ability to execute business actions like the ones we just discussed are what the business cares about – not 5 9’s of availability. Change management – how do you tell if you’re cloud migration, or VDI or mobile roll-out is improving things? And overall assessment of IT’s impact on the customer service and productivity.
Aternity solves this problem by monitoring from the point of IT consumption – the user’s device. Aternity understands everything about the enterprise end user – who they are, what group they belong to in the organization, all of the devices and all of the applications they use, and the business activities for which they are responsible. With Aternity, the user, not the application, is at the center of our monitoring approach. Aternity focuses from the perspective of the end user’s device on the user’s experience of all applications across all devices (physical, virtual, or mobile), by correlating 3 streams of data:
Application performance – Aternity is application agnostic. We can monitor the broadest range of applications in next generation end user computing, whether those apps are under the control of IT or not - including cloud, SaaS, mobile, VDI-delivered apps, as well as Thick Client, Web-based, Rich Internet, and Productivity Apps like Office and Outlook. Since we monitor from the perspective of the end user’s device, we don’t need access to the back end. We monitor the click to render time of the application, as the user sees it, which really is the definition of end user experience.
Device performance – Aternity correlates app performance to key device performance and health metrics, like Disk I/O, CPU, unexpected shutdowns and Blue Screens of Death.
User’s behavior. Aternity can monitor the response time of key business activities the user is responsible for executing in the application, and correlates these the application performance and device performance metrics. We track these for every user, every time the activity is executed.
<second bullet> In contrast, most traditional APM products (like AppDynamics, New Relic, etc) focus on the performance of specific web-based or mobile applications from the vantage point of the data center. APM products are hugely important, and needed, for trouble shooting app problems down to the of code and doing deep dives into the components comprising the delivery system. But Aternity solves a different problem – assuring apps deliver excellent EUE to the workforce for ALL apps, all the time, not just if there’s a problem.
<third bullet> And device monitoring products (like Lakeside, Liquidware Labs, NexThink) primarily provide device & OS metrics for physical or virtual devices, and they know when apps crash, but they have no insight into actual EUE because they don’t correlate these metrics w/app performance or user interactions.
These products provide important capabilities to technical staff who are trouble shooting apps or devices, but they lack the true understanding of the enterprise end user necessary to measure, manage, and improve workforce productivity.
SteelCentral Aternity complements the various MSFT monitoring products. It doesn’t duplicate what they do. It adds value to what they do by monitoring the actual end user experience of every enterprise application running on any laptop, PC, tablet, smartphone or virtual desktop instance.
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) monitors the availability and performance of physical and virtual devices within your data center and networks. Aternity’s value add is that it sees the “last meter” – what end users actually see as they use their applications.
Microsoft Intune provides mobile device management and mobile app management. Management and security are necessary first steps for mobile success. But they’re not sufficient. You have to ensure a quality mobile user experience for your mobile apps. And that’s what Aternity does.
Device Health is the part of Windows Analytics that supplies insights into key performance and health metrics of Windows devices. What Aternity does is monitor what users actually see as applications render on the screens of their devices, and then it correlates that application performance to the underlying device health and performance.
Microsoft Office 365 Workplace Analytics gathers data from collaboration tools (calendar, email, IM, etc.) to analyze how your workforce is spending its time. This is a very good high level measure of aggregate workforce productivity. Aternity’s angle on workforce productivity is to analyze the impact of slow app performance on workforce productivity. What is the cost in lost productivity, if apps are slow to render on the devices of your workforce?
<Note to sales: there’s a nice article in Riverbed Connections that addresses all of this in more detail: https://www.riverbed.com/newsletter/how-adding-steelcentral-aternity-to-your-monitoring-portfolio.html>
<note to sales. The builds in this slide show you exactly what the dashboard shows, so just read the text as you advance the presentation>
<note to sales. The builds in this slide show you exactly what the dashboard shows, so just read the text as you advance the presentation>
Immediate validation – no need for end user services to query the user calling in about what exactly they were doing, when, how long did the problem last, etc. Or for end user services to wonder whether the person is just complaining or the service is actually slow. The info is all right here.
No stop watch timing – no need to incur time and labor to send someone out w/stop watch – an effort that’s not representative of the entire workforce anyway.
Finger pointing – know immediately whether source of delay is on the client’s device or the network or the server. (Note that this breakdown between network and server is a version 9 improvement over previous versions in which we would just compare client to “infrastructure” without breaking down between network and server. Cut down on time taken in arguing by various IT teams. Solve the problem faster
Traffic and data volume – is response slow because there are far more business activities being executed on the app in a given unit of time than there usually are? Or, perhaps the app is slow because the amount of data being transmitted is very high.
If the response time is due to the device, we just covered the dashboard that shows how to troubleshoot. If its in the infrastructure this dashboard shows you whether it’s the server, or the network/load balancer, etc in front of the server.
Most companies don’t have SLAs that are based on application performance – they have them based on overall measures of availability. But 5 9’s of availability on a server doesn’t tell the LOB whether customers have to wait too long to have their order processed. W/Aternity you can define SLAs for business activities in the context of a workflow, so you can determine whether customer expectations are met.
Then you can monitor EVERY instance. Not with a robot, not with sampling – every instance, by every user, organized by dept, geo.
<note to sales – clicking on the little “home” icon in the lower right corner in slide show mode will return you to the “use case summary slide” in the front part of the deck.>
<note to sales. The builds in this slide show you exactly what the dashboard shows, so just read the text as you advance the presentation>
For more information on Riverbed solutions for Office 365, visit our solution page or try Aternity for free via our Instant Access environment.
For more information on Riverbed solutions for Windows 10, visit our solution page or try Aternity for free via our Instant Access environment.