Skip to main content

Maintaining Application Performance with Distributed Users

Nadeem Zahid
cPacket Networks

Thanks to pandemic-related work-from-home (WFH) and digital/mobile customer experience initiatives, employees and users are more distributed than ever. At the same time, organizations everywhere are adopting a cloud-first or cloud-smart architecture, distributing their business applications across private and public cloud infrastructures. Private data centers continue to be consolidated, while more and more branch offices are connecting to data centers and the public cloud simultaneously. Maintaining application performance for distributed users in this increasingly hybrid environment is a significant challenge for IT teams.

Application performance depends on network performance — networks connect end-users and IoT devices with applications and connect application components such as application servers, database servers and microservices together. Whether users are internal employees or external customers, their experience with enterprise and web-based and SaaS applications directly affect an organization's success, either through sales and revenue or employee productivity. Maintaining good application performance through network and application monitoring and troubleshooting helps the business stay on top of their mission-critical business applications to succeed.

IT faces many new challenges when trying to do this for a distributed user base, including:

No visibility into WFH and SaaS traffic: IT no longer has full visibility into traffic from users working from home or remote locations and using SaaS applications that cross the public internet. They'll be blind to any issues and forced to rely on user complaints to diagnose any problems — not a recipe for success.

Tapping the public cloud: The cloud is often a major blind spot to the Application Operations (AppOps) team. How can they measure, much less assure, application performance and dependencies for traffic they can't see? Cloud-native monitoring tools can help observe infrastructure and application layers, but they come with significant limitations. They are vendor-specific, often lack features and visibility compared to on-premises tools, and typically do not integrate well with those on-premises tools.

Troubleshooting without control: Remote employees might be working from a variety of locations — home, public networks, branch offices, or headquarters — and key applications may be virtualized, in the cloud, or located on premise. Traffic going between these many locations that does not pass through a physical switch or firewall and is invisible to traditional network traffic collection and analysis tools. The pressure on IT to ensure a good experience for users in all these scenarios has increased, but their control and ability to troubleshoot has gone down.

To ensure application performance for distributed users, IT must reliably monitor traffic across physical, virtual and cloud-native elements deployed across data centers, branch offices, and multi-cloud environments. Here are some techniques for accomplishing this:

Getting the Right Data

The first step toward ensuring application performance for distributed users is data mining. This starts with tapping strategic points in the network across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure. IT must collect data from all critical locations including north-south traffic into and out of data centers and cloud as well as east-west traffic between virtual machines and/or application and database components of a software-defined data center. Speeds and feeds, scale, and cost matter at this stage. Then IT needs an analysis tool to make sense out of the accumulated packets, flow and metadata. This quickly gets complicated, but in general, IT should be able to measure baselines for application and network performance (latency and connection errors, for example), set thresholds for normal behavior, map dependencies, and generate alerts for service level monitoring. This last part is vital — alerting when performance deviates from a normal range allows IT to proactively investigate and fix issues before users complain.

Tapping the Cloud

One successful approach to collecting, consolidating, and analyzing traffic in the cloud involves a software-only solution natively integrated with leading Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) traffic-mirroring services. Advanced functions such as filtering, load balancing, slicing, etc. can be applied to the cloud application workloads. This not only enables seamless access to the VPC's network data, but it also reduces complexity and cost. By natively replicating and monitoring network traffic to tools within their VPC, IT teams can avoid using forwarding agents or container-based sensors.

By monitoring application traffic before a cloud migration, IT can build a baseline of normal performance. During and after the migration, they can continue monitoring to see if performance deviates, and proactively identify issues before they affect users.

Distributed user bases are here to stay, thanks to hybrid work schedules, cloud migrations, virtualization and data center consolidation. IT must adapt to this new reality and ensure their monitoring capabilities can proactively identify linked network and application issues and reduce cost and complexity no matter where users are located.

Nadeem Zahid is VP of Product Management & Marketing at cPacket Networks

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Maintaining Application Performance with Distributed Users

Nadeem Zahid
cPacket Networks

Thanks to pandemic-related work-from-home (WFH) and digital/mobile customer experience initiatives, employees and users are more distributed than ever. At the same time, organizations everywhere are adopting a cloud-first or cloud-smart architecture, distributing their business applications across private and public cloud infrastructures. Private data centers continue to be consolidated, while more and more branch offices are connecting to data centers and the public cloud simultaneously. Maintaining application performance for distributed users in this increasingly hybrid environment is a significant challenge for IT teams.

Application performance depends on network performance — networks connect end-users and IoT devices with applications and connect application components such as application servers, database servers and microservices together. Whether users are internal employees or external customers, their experience with enterprise and web-based and SaaS applications directly affect an organization's success, either through sales and revenue or employee productivity. Maintaining good application performance through network and application monitoring and troubleshooting helps the business stay on top of their mission-critical business applications to succeed.

IT faces many new challenges when trying to do this for a distributed user base, including:

No visibility into WFH and SaaS traffic: IT no longer has full visibility into traffic from users working from home or remote locations and using SaaS applications that cross the public internet. They'll be blind to any issues and forced to rely on user complaints to diagnose any problems — not a recipe for success.

Tapping the public cloud: The cloud is often a major blind spot to the Application Operations (AppOps) team. How can they measure, much less assure, application performance and dependencies for traffic they can't see? Cloud-native monitoring tools can help observe infrastructure and application layers, but they come with significant limitations. They are vendor-specific, often lack features and visibility compared to on-premises tools, and typically do not integrate well with those on-premises tools.

Troubleshooting without control: Remote employees might be working from a variety of locations — home, public networks, branch offices, or headquarters — and key applications may be virtualized, in the cloud, or located on premise. Traffic going between these many locations that does not pass through a physical switch or firewall and is invisible to traditional network traffic collection and analysis tools. The pressure on IT to ensure a good experience for users in all these scenarios has increased, but their control and ability to troubleshoot has gone down.

To ensure application performance for distributed users, IT must reliably monitor traffic across physical, virtual and cloud-native elements deployed across data centers, branch offices, and multi-cloud environments. Here are some techniques for accomplishing this:

Getting the Right Data

The first step toward ensuring application performance for distributed users is data mining. This starts with tapping strategic points in the network across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure. IT must collect data from all critical locations including north-south traffic into and out of data centers and cloud as well as east-west traffic between virtual machines and/or application and database components of a software-defined data center. Speeds and feeds, scale, and cost matter at this stage. Then IT needs an analysis tool to make sense out of the accumulated packets, flow and metadata. This quickly gets complicated, but in general, IT should be able to measure baselines for application and network performance (latency and connection errors, for example), set thresholds for normal behavior, map dependencies, and generate alerts for service level monitoring. This last part is vital — alerting when performance deviates from a normal range allows IT to proactively investigate and fix issues before users complain.

Tapping the Cloud

One successful approach to collecting, consolidating, and analyzing traffic in the cloud involves a software-only solution natively integrated with leading Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) traffic-mirroring services. Advanced functions such as filtering, load balancing, slicing, etc. can be applied to the cloud application workloads. This not only enables seamless access to the VPC's network data, but it also reduces complexity and cost. By natively replicating and monitoring network traffic to tools within their VPC, IT teams can avoid using forwarding agents or container-based sensors.

By monitoring application traffic before a cloud migration, IT can build a baseline of normal performance. During and after the migration, they can continue monitoring to see if performance deviates, and proactively identify issues before they affect users.

Distributed user bases are here to stay, thanks to hybrid work schedules, cloud migrations, virtualization and data center consolidation. IT must adapt to this new reality and ensure their monitoring capabilities can proactively identify linked network and application issues and reduce cost and complexity no matter where users are located.

Nadeem Zahid is VP of Product Management & Marketing at cPacket Networks

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...