Digital Experience Assurance : Public Cloud User Experience Monitoring

Problem

Modern enterprises are increasingly moving away from desktop-based Office applications to adopt cloud- based Office365 applications. Enterprises’ global workforces constantly depend on Office365 applications such as Office365 Common, Exchange/Outlook, Sharepoint/OneDrive, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, etc. to support all aspects of the enterprises’ mission-critical business needs. Therefore, ensuring continuous availability and service assurance of such mission-critical applications is paramount for business success and client satisfaction.

Cloud-based Office365 applications are accessed over multiple administrative network domains (LAN,
WAN, Microsoft data center, etc.). Moreover, access to these applications depends on DNS, along with various other network services/functions such as Active Directory (AD), LDAP, multifactor authentication (such as DUO), etc. for proper and authorized access. Many enterprises also use distributed DNS to serve various user groups (on-premise, remote, etc.) for better load balancing and other operational efficiency. Users may be served by different DNS servers based on their locations and time of the day. The same is true for Azure-cloud-based AD services, or AWS-cloud-based DUO multifactor authentication services.

In such an enterprise, when a user complained that an Office365 application is inaccessible or slow, or
Skype communications are problematic (the video is grainy or absent, the audio is jittery or unintelligible,
etc.), the enterprise’s IT staff had to determine if the problem is in the application or its components, or
the network, or the network services/functions. The problem is exacerbated as the enterprise has multiple
offices in different locations, and the applications rely on hybrid deployments, such as the Sharepoint application, which may have on-prem servers at the company’s offices and other servers distributed in the Azure cloud. IT staff should be able to resolve these issues by gaining visibility in all aspects of the Office365 application-delivery infrastructure, spanning from on-prem and WAN infrastructures to all
network services deployed in the public cloud or on-premise servers.

Solution

Built with a vision to dramatically improve enterprises’ user performance analytics, Ennetix xVisor focuses
on the entire Office365 application-delivery infrastructure (from application servers to network
infrastructures to network services) and utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered inference engines that
analyze granular-level network and service performance (on-premise or cloud) specific to an Office365
application and its users. xVisor creates a complete performance picture of end-to-end application-
delivery and network-service-dependency paths, and it can pinpoint performance issues in application
transactions, network infrastructures (LAN, WAN, etc.), or network services (e.g., DNS, AD, or DUO servers) in near real-time for each application user. xVisor continuously learns about baseline behavior and performance of every Office365 application user, and alerts administrators intelligently (using
advanced AI/ML algorithms) on when to take actions to proactively troubleshoot performance issues before they start to seriously impact application users. 

Ennetix xVisor provides enterprises the following benefits for optimized Office365 experience to every
user:

(1) Visibility into every user’s application and service transactions and service dependencies;

(2) Detailed performance analysis of end-to-end network infrastructures to application and service servers;
(3) Pinpoint and troubleshoot network and/or service performance issues for different user groups (on-prem or cloud); and

(4) Planning insights from AI-powered systemic analysis to optimize the best Office365 experience.