VPN Management and Monitoring

What is VPN Management & Monitoring?

VPN management and monitoring refers to the act of monitoring and assuring optimal network connectivity when users are connected to a VPN. Virtual Private Networks allow users to send and receive 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 a VPN management and monitoring measures in place.

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

In the past few months, 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 the remote workers has led networks being turned inside-out with a 41% increase in global VPN demand, along with many challenges. In fact, VPN oversubscription is a leading cause of network disruption for remotely based employees, severely impacting productivity.

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.

Solutions That Simplify VPN Monitoring

To sufficiently assess and correct VPN performance issues that remote users are facing, it’s imperative that  every device and conversation happening across the network is thoroughly monitored. 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 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 enables IT teams to identify and address any VPN or other service issues before they seriously impact connectivity or increase in severity.

VIAVI Observer Platform 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, the VPN provider, or the ISP?
• Where is the delay occurring? What is to blame for the performance issue?
• Can you tell whether the problem is network, application, or server related?

Key Benefits of the VIAVI VPN Management & Monitoring 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.

Optimize VPN Performance Through Proactive Monitoring

Gathering volumetric enriched-flow data from VPN concentrators, enables IT teams to monitor and assure the performance of the VPN service. Based on the monitoring output, optimization of the VPN 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. VIAVI Observer end-user experience scoring and enriched flow capabilities make it simple to identify and resolve VPN-related performance issues, fast.

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