VPN Monitoring and Management

What is VPN Monitoring?

VPN monitoring refers to the act of maintaining optimal service delivery in a network where users connect via a VPN tunnels. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) allow users to access data across public networks as if they were directly connected like a private network, critical for securing the endpoints of remote users. To ensure peak network performance and identify VPN related performance issues before they escalate in severity, it is critical that enterprises have VPN monitoring software in place.

Challenges that Enterprises Face when Monitoring and Managing Virtual Private Networks (VPN)

Recently, IT teams have been grappling with disruption as they expand their remote workforce at immense scale and compressed timeframe. Most networks were never architected to operate with a large proportion of the employee workforce located outside of the network perimeter. This sudden expansion of remote workers has led to networks being turned inside-out with a 41% increase in global VPN demand. As a result, teams have to deal with many system challenges. In fact, VPN oversubscription is a leading cause of network disruption for remotely based employees, severely impacting work productivity. The need to monitor VPN traffic and ensure that productivity is maintained has never been greater.

How to Alleviate VPN Management Problems

The worldwide remote working transition that has happened at unprecedented scale in 2020, has changed the IT department’s perspective of network infrastructure connectivity overnight; suddenly visibility into the end-user experience has become of critical importance. According to the 2020 State of the Network Survey, remote users experience is now the primary area in which IT teams require additional operational visibility. VPN monitoring tools can ensure that the experience of the remote user connected via a VPN tunnel is not impaired.

Solutions That Simplify VPN Monitoring

To sufficiently assess and correct VPN performance issues that remote users are facing, it is imperative that every device and conversation happening across the network is thoroughly monitored – this includes VPN traffic monitoring. With VIAVI Observer, the VPN provider will identify the end-user experience (EUE) through a simple-to-understand, patented EUE score that uses hundreds of monitoring data points and machine learning to display one simple metric.

The score indicates if the network is performing outside of your parameters and what is causing the problem: the network, a server, or an application. This allows IT teams to identify and address any VPN or other service issues before they seriously impact connectivity or increase in severity.

The VIAVI Observer Platform dashboard provides insights into the remote user’s experience, will help network teams get answers such as:

• Is the VPN provider the cause of the problem?
• If it is a network issue, is it the corporate network center, the VPN provider, or the ISP?
• Where is the delay occurring? What is to blame for the specific performance issue?
• Can you tell whether the problem is network, application, or server related?

Key Benefits of the VIAVI VPN Monitoring and Management Solution:

Enriched Flow = Enriched-Performance Visibility

Observer Platform also provides an enriched-flow capability. Stitching together traditional-flow data with device information, user identity, application usage and more, IT teams are given increased insight and visibility into the performance of devices on the network and the traffic traversing them. Your load balancer, your next generation Cisco ASA firewall, your SD-WAN controller, all can be easily navigated to with the VIAVI Observer IP viewer.

Because the VIAVI Observer IP viewer can even provide insights into ports associated with VPN monitoring traffic, IT departments can use it to spot compromised accounts that show irregular VPN tunnel usage patterns for remote workers. This shows how monitoring VPN traffic can with the proper monitoring software can even secure your network.

Optimize VPN Performance Through Proactive Monitoring

Can VPN performance be monitored? Yes, absolutely. Gathering volumetric enriched-flow data from VPN concentrators, enables IT teams to monitor and assure the performance of the VPN service in real time. Based on the monitoring output, optimization of the VPN connection configuration can take place over time. For instance, if 40% of the traffic goes to O365, IT teams can configure and use split tunneling to optimize bandwidth utilization.

In today’s remote working era, comprehensive network visibility has become more of a priority than ever before. The last thing that an organization with thousands of VPN connections needs is for the VPN tunnel status to be down when the end-user needs them live the most. The VIAVI Observer VPN tunnel monitoring tool with end-user experience scoring and enriched-flow capabilities make it simple to start monitoring VPN connectivity and identify and resolve VPN-related performance and availability issues, fast.

To see the Observer platform in action, view our online demos.