At Your (Remote) Service

2 Ways to Speed Up Your Application on the Network



Most of us have experienced this at one time or another… A critical application on the network is operating at a painfully slow speed. End-user tension increases as “everything bogs down.”  People begin to point fingers as support engineers scramble to find a solution…
There are a variety reasons that an application can suffer a decrease of speed on the network.
Initially, many people may assume that the application itself is to blame for slow performance, but typically this is not the case. More often than not, the issue is related to other factors.
When confronted with an application that is running slowly on the network, two simple steps can be used to isolate and solve the problem:

1. Find the bottlenecks by analyzing and managing your application - to find the root cause of slowness on the network, isolate the problem by asking the following questions:
   • What part of the Network is slow? (LAN, Campus, WAN, Internet?)
   • What is the bandwidth usage for each direction (in and out)?
   • What type of data (protocol) and application (ports) are using most of the bandwidth?
     
     For example, moving high resolution images on a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) can dramatically slow a network. Bottlenecks can be found by monitoring the application port that generates the traffic, identifying the source node and focusing on the affected subnet.
     
     
2. Consider automation strategies to accelerate and improve service to your customer - some network delays can be the result of a lack of resources on the OS or storage level. Here are some items you should look into while monitoring resources:
   • What is CPU and memory usage on operating systems used to host network applications? By monitoring the CPU and memory usage on the application level, you can easily pinpoint application bottlenecks.
   • Do any of the applications run on virtual machines (VMs)? What resources are allocated to VMs?
   • How is Storage Area Networking (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) being used? What are the IOPS and the read/write transfer rates?
     
     Another example from healthcare - many picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) are using SAN for storage. Some storage may be over-used while other storage may not be allocated at all. Monitoring of application I/O to the database (looking into the application log files or database metrics, etc.) can help with the automation of the troubleshooting process.

Speeding up a slow application on the network is easy to do when you know what to look for. We hope that these tips will help you to provide a better user experience to your customers.

Author: Nir Yosha, Pre Sales Manager - NextNine Inc.

An Often Overlooked Use Case of Remote Service

When most companies begin to consider a remote product service program, they think of the classic benefits such as reducing service delivery costs using remote diagnostics or increasing customer satisfaction by proactively discovering problems. These benefits are certainly the low-hanging fruit, and should form the basis of a solid remote service program.

However, once an organization gains experience with remote service, it often discovers a powerful benefit of remote service - customer usage insight.

A good remote service solution should be flexible enough to allow an organization to collect and analyze any piece of data from its products at the customer sight, and to trigger the appropriate business process. You shouldn't stop at collecting information about the health and performance of your asset. Your remote service solution can give you priceless information about how your customers are using your product. Unbiased customer usage data collected from your products is very different to interviewing your customers and asking them how they use your product (which we still advise organizations to do regularly), and can open up a world of opportunity.

Here are some real-life examples of how companies are leveraging customer usage insight:

• A machine manufacturer regularly measures the overall usage levels by its customers. When the remote service agent discovers that a machine is rarely used, an alarm is triggered to the account manager who follows up to discover why the machine was not in use and how the vendor may assist

• A complex broadband vendor monitors for inefficient use of its product by the customer. The vendor then offers custom training (along with a report that "proves" these inefficiencies) to help the customer extract more value from the system

• A company has introduced a more powerful version of its product. The marketing team collects usage information to discover the customers who are currently running at full throttle. The company initiates a targeted campaign for these customers

We encourage you to start thinking about how you can leverage customer usage insight for your products. Incorporating these elements early in your program can have a powerful impact on the way you service your customers.

See also: Procative Support