Since governments around the world are asking people to work-from-home in order to fight COVID-19, I keep hearing questions from colleagues, customers, and partners alike:
- Are people being as productive as they would be if they were working from their office desk?
- Are people changing their working patterns?
- Are the systems we rely on every day as reliable via the home internet connection?
- Is working via a VPN as good as working from the office?
I posed these questions to a couple of friends and colleagues who are responsible for monitoring critical infrastructure and services and my friend Jignesh and my colleagues from the LogNTrack shared the following stories and screenshots with me.
Example #1 Order System: No change in user or buyers’ behavior
The first example comes from Jignesh, who is using LogNTrack to monitor core business applications. One of those being an Order System, which is either used by employees working in their in-house call centers or external sales agents who access the same systems from their respective sales locations. Both types of users mentioned access to the same system, the only difference is that employees access it via the internal network and externals through a public exposed URL.
Thomas has set up LogNTrack Real User Monitoring in a way for it to monitor internal and external traffic separately. That’s possible because he can define applications based on URL patterns, which allowed him to define one application for the internal URI and one for the public URL.
Splitting traffic into two separate applications also allows you to:
- Enforce different SLAs for internal vs external
- Setup different alerting and remediation actions
- Monitor new feature flag releases launched for internal users before promoting them to external agents
To demonstrate how this has impacted users, Thomas shared with me. Since working-from-home went into effect on March 16th, management wanted to know whether all employees can still access the internal system by connecting via the VPN and whether this changed the behavior of using the Order System.
Example #2 ensuring DevOps toolchain availability at LogNTrack
The second example comes from our logntrack a remote employee tracking and Track activities Teams who are providing a lot of tooling and services for our developers to stay productive.
One of our version control systems is Bitbucket. If that system is not performing as expected it impacts all our Users around the globe. That’s why the following two screenshots are very telling for our Logntrack team:
Setup your own monitoring while work-from-home
I hope these examples have answered a ton of pressing questions such as:
- People working from home can be as productive as in the office
- There are many systems that contribute to productivity, e.g., your external services but also internal tools services
I also hope that after reading this you want to ensure you are starting to do the same in your organization. LogNTrack makes monitoring and optimizing your critical system easier than ever in times like this. In case you haven’t heard it yet – but – LogNTrack offers free access to our Software Intelligence Platform to monitor critical systems that are under more stress due to work-from-home. With that, you can go ahead, monitor, and optimize your own systems. Start by signing up for the LogNTrack free Trial, then set up your first synthetic tests and install your first OneAgents on those machines that run critical services. If you have any questions – just let me know.
Stay safe, stay healthy!