Enterprises often neglect monitoring of desktops
When you make VoIP and other real-time communications tools a core part of the organization’s infrastructure, you have to deliver them with solid and reliable performance. Enterprise application performance depends on data-center systems, network infrastructure and desktops, but most enterprises monitor only the first two, servers and networks, and neglect the third.
Alas, it’s impossible to make realistic promises, or deliver on promises reliably, without instrumentation that can monitor performance. With UC focusing on PC clients working against hosts in the data center, folks need to be taking a look at their desktops too, but most organizations still rely on the help desk, infrequent user surveys, and the “squeaky wheels” among their users to get end-point performance feedback. The most popular remedy is often, still, “Reboot and call me in the morning.” But as desktop performance becomes a more crucial part of the delivery of all IT services, including basic voice communications as UC continues to spread to new organizations and to penetrate deeper into those deploying it, such a disruptive solution (and the attitude and posture behind it) become increasingly hard to justify.
Nemertes has found less than 40% of organizations doing direct, regular assessments of application performance at the desktop. Without looking directly at the desktop as a part of the performance equation, IT can’t identify and fix performance problems there with the same ease and reliability as with a congested network node or overburdened call server.
You can go in a few different directions with monitoring performance at the endpoint. Some tools look deep into the OS to get answers about what within the environment is consuming resources. Others are more focused on network applications, specifically. Most are agent-based, and many can provide rich data for analyzing transaction times for a broad palette of applications, both fat client and Web-based, not just your real-time communications apps.
Bottom line, though, is that IT will want something more robust than waiting for complaints as they make the organization ever more dependent on PC performance for all aspects of communications.
