Leveraging Network Automation for Proactive Diagnostics and Visibility

By now, COVID-19 has impacted all of us in some way, shape, or form. We truly hope everyone is following the guidelines and recommendations from WHO and their local authorities.

Most of our clients have already implemented a mandatory “work from home” policy for the foreseeable future (all of our employees are fully remote too). What we are seeing is a major impact to the technology infrastructure supporting their businesses. Often it is the front-line workers or customers that are consuming the infrastructure.

For example, after speaking to just a few of our clients, we’ve heard the following:

• There is a greater need for visibility and dashboards for all types of traffic, performance, and capacity for remote and VPN infrastructure. There is increased troubleshooting happening in remote access, security, and VPN infrastructure.
• There is increased use of VPN concentrators that may not be sized for performance, so they are actively disconnecting users that are idle for more than a certain period of time.
• There is increased use of collaboration systems like WebEx Teams, Slack, and MS Teams.
• With the general public at home, video games and streaming are putting even more demand on the network infrasructure and supporting systems.

A common approach to these problems we’ve taken in the past (way before COVID-19) is to automate proactive troubleshooting and diagnostics ensuring there isn’t degraded performance and also to ensure there is enough capacity on remote access, security, wireless, and collaboration systems. Automating these types of tasks can easily be integrated to Chat programs as well ensuring anyone on the team can execute the task at hand.

Please do not hesitate to reach out, even if it is for high level guidance. We can try and help. You can email us at info@networktocode.com and get community input on the Network to Code Slack Workspace too.

-Jason