May 4, 2023

Streamlining Troubleshooting for Work-from-Home Users: Tips for Effective Active Monitoring

It may feel like ancient history, but it was only a few years ago that, in response to the pandemic, organizations made a wholesale shift to support hybrid work models—and did so literally overnight, in many cases.

While some time has passed, this is a shift to which many IT organizations are still struggling to fully adapt.

Hybrid work models of today typically feature a mix of work arrangements, such as occasional work days in corporate offices, home offices, shared workspaces, satellite offices, and so on.

For IT teams, it is often work-from-home models that can be particularly vexing, and have a negative impact on staff efficiency and productivity.

Challenges

The key challenge is that when a user works from home, it brings Wi-Fi, home networks, and external ISPs into the picture. Clearly, IT teams don’t “own” these services, and many teams fundamentally lack any visibility into these different areas.

As a result, when end users encounter issues, it can be difficult and time consuming to help with troubleshooting. IT staff may ultimately have to dedicate the time and effort to remotely connect to the end-user device to do diagnostics. Teams may have to spend inordinate amounts of time to prove the “innocence” of their internal networks, only to find out the issue stems from an outage at a third party, such as a last-mile ISP or carrier.

Another complicating factor is home network variability. A user working on a home Wi-Fi may experience very different levels of performance depending on whether they’re on the back deck, in the kitchen, or in their office, and whether they’re alone in the house or an entire family is home and streaming videos and playing games on their own devices.

Tips for Success

To contend with today’s hybrid work realities, it is essential to implement active monitoring from the end-user perspective. For IT teams looking to establish effective active testing in order to support work-from-home users, here are a few key suggestions:

Establish a strong representative sample. In implementing active monitoring, it is important to establish an effective sampling of the different types of personnel that make up the user community. For example, the needs and environments of a developer will vary substantially from those of a marketing executive. Other factors such as regions and applications can also play significant roles. Toward that end, teams should employ sampling approaches that address these different use cases and user types. Teams must also look at the full network path of end users, including office Wi-Fis, last-mile ISPs, backbone providers, and app provider environments, whether those are in an internal data center or external cloud provider.
Regional proxies for outside-in monitoring. Generally, we recommend taking an inside-out approach, that is, starting with testing from the end-user perspective, and taking the same network paths that users rely upon. When that’s not possible, another alternative is to take an outside-in approach. This entails deploying agents on regional proxies, and doing active testing on the locations and services that matter to the business.
ISP coverage. Teams need to take a “trust but verify” approach to third-party networks and services. They must ensure that active testing traverses networks that users rely upon, including residential ISPs from home environments. It is also important for IT teams to establish the visibility needed to independently and objectively track and report on the SLA compliance of third-party ISPs that serve their office environments.

Watch Our Presentation to Learn More

To learn more, be sure to watch our Small Bytes presentation, How do I efficiently troubleshoot issues with end users that work from home? This session looks at the persistent challenges associated with troubleshooting issues for work-from-home users, and it shows how teams can employ AppNeta to boost visibility and staff efficiency.

Tag(s): AppNeta , Network Monitoring , Network Observability

Alec Pinkham

Alec is a Product Marketing Manager for the AppNeta solution at Broadcom. He spent seven years with AppNeta in the Application and Network Performance Monitoring space before joining Broadcom. Prior to AppNeta his background is in software product management in HMI/SCADA solutions for industrial automation as well as...

Other resources you might be interested in

Course April 24, 2026

Automic Automation: Getting Started with the Automic Web Interface (AWI)

Get started with the v26 Automic Web Interface (AWI). Learn how to navigate the modernized UI, customize your workspace, and move between perspectives.

Go to Training

Course April 22, 2026

ValueOps ConnectALL: Synchronize Jira and Rally for Frictionless Cost Accounting

This course teaches you how to integrate Jira data into Rally for the purpose of frictionless cost accounting in Clarity.

Go to Training

Course April 22, 2026

AppNeta: Introducing the Intelligent Alarms Experience

Learn how to use the new Intelligent Alarms experience in AppNeta, including new metrics, new user workflows, and the new thresholding, event, and alarm system.

Go to Training

Office Hours April 16, 2026

Rally Office Hours: April 16, 2026

Join Rally Office Hours to get expert tips and the latest product news. Explore new AI controls, Monte Carlo simulation for milestones, and more.

View Recording

Blog April 14, 2026

Announcing AutoSys 24.2: Accelerating Operations with Self-Service Agility and Automated Security

Learn how AutoSys 24.2 helps reduce administrative bottlenecks, minimize security risks, and accelerate incident resolution.

Read Blog

Blog April 10, 2026

The Next Chapter for AutoSys: Moving Toward the Intelligent Control Plane

Is Broadcom still investing in AutoSys? Yes! Learn about the V26 roadmap, which features MCP orchestration, AI job types, and AI-powered developer assistance.

Read Blog

Course April 10, 2026

Automic Automation: Upgrading to Version 26

This course guides you through and demonstrates the process to upgrade Automic Automation from version 24 to version 26 on a Windows platform. The Unix upgrade is virtually the same.

Go to Training

Course April 10, 2026

Automic Automation: Integrated Database Maintenance

See how Automic administrators can leverage the Integrated Database Maintenance suite to optimize their Automation Engine database for peak performance.

Go to Training

Office Hours April 9, 2026

Rally Office Hours: April 9, 2026

Discover the latest Rally product updates, including new widgets and AI controls, plus upcoming events like the Big Room Planning workshop.

View Recording