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The End-User is Always Right

Bruce Kosbab

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.

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End-User is Always Right

Bruce Kosbab

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.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...