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Despite the recent shift toward return-to-office (RTO) policies, organizations continue to embrace remote work. In fact, recent studies show that hybrid and remote work trends are still growing, with the percentage of full-time in-office workers down by 6% compared to 2023. 

As remote and hybrid work expands, organizations must take a more strategic approach to addressing IT challenges related to remote visibility. Traditional network monitoring tools are designed for corporate environments and offer little to no insight into home Wi-Fi performance, internet service provider (ISP) slowdowns, or remote connectivity issues.

This article explores how limited visibility makes it increasingly difficult for IT teams to diagnose and resolve problems affecting remote workers—and how solutions like AppNeta by Broadcom help address these issues by providing end-to-end performance visibility. With AppNeta’s performance monitoring tools, IT teams can quickly pinpoint and resolve issues, ensuring a seamless and productive user experience for remote employees.

The Visibility Gap: Why Traditional Network Monitoring Falls Short

Traditional network monitoring tools are designed with corporate environments and users in mind, focusing primarily on internal network segments and VPN connections. While effective within office settings, these tools are inadequate in remote and hybrid work environments, where employees rely on home and external Wi-Fi, third-party ISPs, and personal laptops and devices. This limitation creates significant visibility gaps, making it difficult for IT teams to accurately diagnose and resolve connectivity issues.

Lack of Remote Visibility

IT teams face significant challenges when troubleshooting external factors affecting network performance. A slow or unstable connection might stem from home network congestion, an ISP-related issue, or a personal device switching between Wi-Fi bands. Traditional monitoring solutions, built to troubleshoot corporate network performance, fail to capture these nuances. As a result, teams often waste valuable time investigating the wrong causes—assuming the problem lies within the company’s network rather than the user’s home environment.

Consider a remote employee who reports slow internet speeds during video calls. The corporate IT team investigates VPN performance or internal network congestion using conventional monitoring tools but struggles to provide an accurate diagnosis. In reality, the issue could be the employee’s home router automatically switching to a slower Wi-Fi band, reducing connection speed. 

To effectively support remote workers, IT teams need modern monitoring solutions that extend beyond corporate boundaries, providing full visibility into home networks, ISPs, and end-user experiences.

How AppNeta Provides Complete Remote Work Visibility

AppNeta equips IT teams with comprehensive network performance monitoring, extending visibility beyond corporate networks into remote and hybrid work environments. By actively monitoring network performance from the user’s device to cloud and corporate resources, AppNeta enables IT teams to quickly diagnose and resolve connectivity issues—no matter where employees are working.

Key capabilities include Layer 3 performance tracking to measure critical network health indicators, such as packet loss, latency, and jitter. AppNeta also monitors home Wi-Fi and ISP performance, helping IT teams determine whether connectivity issues stem from an employee’s local network or their internet service provider. 

In addition, AppNeta distinguishes between VPN and direct-to-internet traffic, allowing teams to identify whether performance issues originate within the corporate network or externally. AppNeta also collects host metrics to pinpoint device-related slowdowns that may impact productivity.

How AppNeta Mitigates Common Remote Work Challenges

To fully support a remote or hybrid workforce, IT teams must address several recurring performance challenges that go beyond the corporate network. Below are some of the most common issues affecting remote employees—and how AppNeta helps resolve them.

Home Wi-Fi and ISP Performance Issues

One of the biggest challenges for IT teams is limited visibility into home Wi-Fi and ISP performance. Remote workers may encounter slow or congested networks—issues traditional corporate monitoring tools are not designed to detect. For example, performance degradation can happen when a laptop automatically switches from a 5GHz network to a 2.4GHz connection. Without insight into these external variables, IT teams often misdiagnose the root cause of connectivity issues.

AppNeta enables IT teams to identify when users are on suboptimal networks and take proactive steps to improve performance. With clear visibility into home Wi-Fi conditions and ISP reliability, IT teams can better allocate support resources, reducing employee frustration and minimizing downtime.

Unexpected Device Behavior

Not all network problems originate from the network itself. Often, the issue stems from the user’s device—for example, a system reboot triggered by an automatic OS update. By monitoring key device metrics such as CPU usage, memory consumption, and active processes, IT teams and service partners can detect performance bottlenecks affecting productivity.

AppNeta helps teams monitor device health alongside network performance, making it easier to determine whether a slowdown is due to a failing application, resource-heavy process, or system update. This broader visibility speeds up troubleshooting and keeps remote employees working without unnecessary interruptions.

VPN and Network Routing Issues

Network performance can also suffer depending on how traffic is routed—whether through a corporate VPN or directly to the internet. For example, a sales executive may experience poor CRM performance due to restrictions on a hotel’s guest Wi-Fi network. To resolve these kinds of issues, IT needs visibility into traffic routing paths.

AppNeta distinguishes between VPN and direct-to-internet traffic, allowing IT teams to identify routing inefficiencies and provide tailored recommendations. This ensures employees maintain fast, reliable access to business-critical applications, regardless of their location or network conditions.

Excessive Network Usage By Other Home Users

Unlike corporate environments with controlled traffic policies, home networks are often shared with family members and other devices competing for bandwidth. Streaming, gaming, and large downloads can degrade performance—especially during critical work tasks like video calls.

AppNeta can detect when non-work activities consume excessive bandwidth, giving IT the insights needed to guide employees on managing usage. Whether it’s pausing downloads, adjusting router quality-of-service (QoS) settings, or scheduling updates outside of work hours, these actions help ensure work applications get the bandwidth they need to run smoothly.

Future-Proofing Your Enterprise Visibility

So while RTO is in full swing, the reality is that work-from-anywhere (WFA) is here to stay. AppNeta addresses WFA monitoring challenges by giving IT teams the visibility they need to better support remote workers. AppNeta offers a streamlined, low-effort solution that helps IT teams diagnose problems rapidly, reducing MTTR without requiring extensive technical expertise.

As a Broadcom Pinnacle and EA+ partner, A&I Solutions brings deep technical expertise and a strategic partnership advantage. Our team of IT solutions experts offers a full range of Professional Services—including implementation, upgrades, migrations, and tailored consulting—to help organizations optimize performance in today’s hybrid and remote work environments. Whether you’re just beginning to monitor remote connectivity or scaling an enterprise-wide strategy to support distributed teams, A&I is here to support every step of your journey.

Ready to explore how proactive IT monitoring can enhance your remote workforce’s experience? Watch our on-demand webinar to see it in action, or connect with an A&I Solutions expert to get started today.