News

Exoprise Adds Real-Time Alarms, Active Tests and macOS Device Support

• By Kurt Mackie
• 06/13/2023

Exoprise has bolstered its Service Watch product with three enhancements for IT departments that need to support workforces using software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps.

Service Watch is a digital experience monitoring solution that uses a lightweight agent on devices to detect problems encountered by end users, sometimes in advance of service provider reporting. Newly announced this week are three 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."

Networking issues can be more complicated with remote users. They likely may be using their own devices (BYOD), plus their own networks (BYON), which may not be too good.

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, a digital experience monitoring company, 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.

Sometimes Exoprise makes the news by being able to detect SaaS outages before they get announced by service providers. One example is Microsoft's Outlook Web App problems that occurred earlier this month. Exoprise indicated it had detected the problems two hours before Microsoft's report.