Prevention is always better than cure, right?

That’s because, in times of trouble, being ahead of the game is always preferable to playing catch up.

Glitches, outages, human error: in business, these are the things which, when they surprise you, can have a disproportionately-negative impact on your most basic daily processes.

Take Microsoft Teams, for example.

Hundreds of millions rely upon it every day to communicate and collaborate; clients have become users’ most essential workplace tools; endpoints are scattered the world over.

So, how can enterprises be certain it is all working as it should? Who warns central IT teams if something looks amiss? And how are problems swiftly diagnosed and fixed? Having full 24/7 sight of it all helps massively; and constant testing is crucial. For those enterprises and their technology service providers, partnering with experts can make all the difference.

“So many people now rely on Teams to do their business and, by the time a user experiences a problem, productivity has already been lost – yes, the problem can likely be fixed, but how much more efficient is it to see the problem early and act before it has an impact?” says Randah McKinnie, VP of Product at leading digital experiencer management software provider Martello, whose  Vantage DX solution is purpose-built to enable frictionless Microsoft functionality.

“For example, the problem might cut-off a conversation with a customer, so a revenue or re-sign opportunity could be lost. Research suggests that only 16% of users will ever open a ticket when Microsoft Teams is down or slow. When they finally do, it could be too late.”

Martello Vantage DX is a powerful proactive performance monitoring tool which issues proactive text or email alerts when Teams (and any other element of O365) is performing poorly. Via an easy-to-understand, all-in-one-place dashboard, IT teams are then able to drill deeper into an issue to discover the ‘what, where, and how’ and, ultimately, begin work on a swift fix.

“Teams, of course, delivers huge efficiency and productivity benefits to user organisations but there are also lots of moving parts that can go wrong,” says McKinnie. “Let’s say a user is running an old PC with diminishing memory or processing power; an old client that has not been upgraded to the latest version; a local network with insufficient bandwidth; a provider network outage; or even an issue in Microsoft’s own data center. All of these things have the potential to cause disruption.

“The Martello Vantage DX solution carries out constant synthetic testing in the background; acting like a robot, placing calls, setting up calls, sending messages, trying to share its screen. It replicates the user experience and is on a constant look-out for problems. It also analyses data from Microsoft about how its wider service is performing. For example, if a Microsoft outage occurs, Vantage DX is aware of it around an hour before Microsoft makes a public announcement. That means users can implement their back-up plan quickly in order for business to continue as usual. Microsoft does have some in-built monitoring and diagnostic tools, but there are blind spots, and those tools are very much reactive as opposed to proactive.”

Importantly, Vantage DX’s proactive monitoring also mitigates against frustrating and time-wasting ‘finger pointing’ by the providers of component parts of any disrupted system. Instead, it is able to categorically pinpoint the cause and location of any issue and, therefore, which provider is responsible.

“In the event of a problem, that kind of initial passing of the buck can take up a tonne of time in its own right,” says McKinnie. “Having complete transparency, deep-dive visibility, and detailed performance metrics right there in front of you enables the root cause of a problem to be identified fast. That kind of effectiveness and efficiency impacts positively on IT teams. We are carrying out cost saving analysis with a Microsoft MVP and early indications suggest that Vantage DX user organisations will be able to reduce their number of IT people dealing with Teams support issues from 3.9 to about 1.9. That means people can be freed up to work on things that are more strategic to the business.”

It seems that being ahead of the game really can profoundly affect the end result…

  • To learn more about how Martello can help your and your customers’ businesses benefit from comprehensive O365 observability, click here.


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