The phrase "The customer is always right" is ubiquitous in the business and retail world and one that companies should extend as a matter of course to refer to their employees. For IT teams, they are usually known as the "end user". It is a company’s employees who keep it running and when a network problem gets in the way not only is the end-user frustrated and annoyed, but productivity can quickly be driven to a halt.

One of the biggest challenges network managers face when liaising with the end-user is that user’s lack of understanding of the problem. To a user, their application is not working properly. So they call the Helpdesk. "Just get the technology to work, the sooner the better", the user requests (or demands). They probably have no idea just how complicated that fix might be, and no idea whether the problem is with the application or the network. However complex the problem may be, the end-user expects it to be fixed (relatively) quickly so they can continue with their job and the business can operate smoothly.

AANPM – the End-User Pacifier

If the problem affects multiple users, then the business begins to have a serious problem. If there’s a slowdown or shutdown of the network, or any kind of problem involving the applications running on it, the impact on the business can be huge and costly.

According to a recent Globalscape study, downtime can cost as much as $1 million per hour after accounting for all of the consequences of being offline for a period, and 76 percent of survey respondents referred to end user frustration.

The perfect solution clearly is to fix a problem before this stage. To do this, the network and application teams need complete visibility from the network through to the application to enable them to quickly identify root cause. AANPM (Application-Aware Network Performance Management) can do this by enabling teams to monitor all levels of the user experience and address issues before they become serious. It also provides continuous monitoring to support analysis of trends in the network and applications’ performance.

As AANPM provides end-to-end visibility of the entire IT infrastructure, a single-dashboard view covering both critical applications and the underlying network infrastructure problem-solving is made much faster. It enables engineers to identify problems with a key application and right away use that cross-platform visibility of AANPM to track down the root cause.

And what does this mean? A happy end-user.

Bruce Kosbab is CTO of Fluke Networks.