News

Exoprise Service Watch Gets Real-Time Alarms for Microsoft and Other Services

• By Kurt Mackie
• June 14, 2023

Exoprise Service Watch added three enhancements for IT departments overseeing software-as-a-service (SaaS) app issues.

Service Watch, a digital experience monitoring product, uses a lightweight agent on devices to detect problems encountered by end users, sometimes in advance of service provider reporting. One recent example is Microsoft's Outlook Web App problems that occurred earlier this month, where Exoprise detected the problems two hours before Microsoft's report.

Newly announced this week are three Service Watch enhancements, namely:

• Real-time alarms for network problems, such "response time, packet loss and network jitter."
• Service Watch Active Tests (SWAT), enabled via "synthetics" (headless browsers).
• Network path inspection for macOS devices, in addition to Windows devices, which can be used for troubleshooting the problems of remote workers.

The improvements can be characterized as responses to customer needs when dealing with remote users. Organizations get insights into network performance issues and "deep network analysis for every app," explained Jason Lieblich, Exoprise's founder and president.

The Real-time alarms feature addition allows IT teams members to get notifications about issues that haven't been transparent in the past, such as "local Wi-Fi going bad on a particular user or sets of users, ISP gateway problems, local ISP performance, or even ISP bridging," Lieblich noted, in a Tuesday phone call.

"Let's say you and I are talking and you're on Comcast and I'm on Verizon," he explained. "Often when those two bridge together, they don't perform well. We can pinpoint and set up real-time alarms on those pieces of hop-by-hop data."

The SWAT enhancement provides a lightweight agent for running tests on applications such as Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, as well as Azure services. The agent doesn't add a burden on resource consumption use by end users, and IT pros have control over it.

There's actually an advantage to using synthetics for testing, on top of real-user monitoring, because synthetics can detect problems in advance, Lieblich argued.

"The whole thing of synthetics versus real-user monitoring is that user monitoring gives you complete coverage, but synthetics gives you proactive notifications," he said. "If you're just dependent upon real-user monitoring, you're waiting for someone to have a problem."

Lastly, Exoprise added macOS support to its Service Watch product. Exoprise customers wanted it because their executives use Mac devices. These users had all sorts of problems with Microsoft Teams, Zoom and WebEx that required getting insights through network diagnostics.

"So, we've done it and delivered this proactive network insight and rich characterization of a Mac platform that our customers tell us that nobody else in the DEM space has done yet," Lieblich said.

Boston-based Exoprise uses a combination of sensors (headless browsers) and customer crowd sourcing to detect service outages. Its monitoring solutions extend to "any SaaS app." It offers monitoring support for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services and Google Apps, among other services.