Q&A: How do you proactively solve problems by tracking IoT devices?

Dear Craig,

Our company uses many IoT devices across our global network. But we have struggled to get visibility into how these devices are performing until it affects our bottom line and reduces our productivity. My team wants to proactively identify issues early before they snowball into bigger problems. Is there a simplified, cost-effective way to track all these devices in the network, monitor their performance and detect abnormal behavior?

– A Reader

Dear Reader,

Check out VMware Edge Network Intelligence™ — a key component of VMware SASE™ — which gives enterprise IT teams the necessary visibility to be proactive instead of reactive. Providing you insights into all your IoT devices as these devices access your enterprise apps, VMware Edge Network Intelligence detects your devices automatically, classifies them, and creates a baseline for their performance. This eliminates the need for your team to manually track the devices’ performance over many months to establish thresholds for abnormal versus normal behavior, significantly streamlining their workload.

And because the system automatically identifies the devices, there’s no need to preload them into a database. In fact, it collects data about the devices by simply monitoring all the packet transactions.

By analyzing that historical behavior and performance and monitoring against your automatically established baseline, the solution alerts you when deviations occur, isolates the faults, and offers proactive remediation. For example, if a barcode scanner in a retail facility has performance issues, the app can identify if it is due to the local Wi-Fi connectivity, WAN issues, or the barcode app itself. In addition, the solution analyzes device behavior for abnormal activities that may lead to a potential security issue. For example, if an environmental sensor in a wholesale distribution facility suddenly started talking to a social application, the solution would detect the deviation in behavior and immediately notify you. We do this today for enterprise networks across VMware SD-WAN™ and Wi-Fi. In the future, we’ll expand this support for private mobile cellular networks.

VMware Edge Network Intelligence helps IT embark on a path to self-healing, providing the proactive remediation needed to rapidly resolve your problem before it impacts enterprise productivity.

VMWare

What’s the best part? This cloud-based solution eliminates the operational burden for IT teams. As a result, it will substantially decrease your team’s alert fatigue and help them drive resolutions much faster.

If you are already a VMware SD-WAN customer, VMware Edge Network Intelligence is already baked into your solution — just turn it on! And because there’s no agent installation required, your deployment process is significantly simplified.

To discover more about VMware SASE, click here.