SaaS performance silently impacts productivity
SaaS applications are business critical, but user experience and application performance are difficult to troubleshoot and maintain. IT and Network Operations teams' existing tools (APM, NPM, RUM) are incapable of instrumenting SaaS applications and the dynamic, hybrid networks that deliver them (SD WAN, SASE / CASB) to onsite and remote employees.
There are lots of moving parts in the SaaS application delivery chain that makes it difficult to understand if SaaS performance is degrading, and what to do about it.
There’s no doubt that it’s a critical issue:42% of SaaS users report consistently poor performance, while IT reports that 39% of user experience issues aren't detected by existing systems.*
SaaS application performance is a challenge as it relies on a unique stack of modern, cloud-centric and hybrid network infrastructure. When you add work from home employees, it appears that much of SaaS performance may be out of the control of network and IT operations teams. These are the most common SaaS performance challenges reported by enterprise IT organizations:
- No control over the hosting infrastructure: SaaS providers don’t offer any way to monitor applications server-side - they can’t be instrumented with agents or scripts. SaaS applications like SalesForce are hosted on a mix of public and private clouds and legacy data centers.
- Encryption everywhere: Whether employees are onsite or at home, accessing via private networks, VPNs, the internet or CASB-secured connectivity, SaaS applications enforce TLS 1.3 encryption end-to-end, rendering DPI-centric traffic analysis approaches ineffective.
- Distributed users: SaaS is heavily adopted by multinationals, many having hundreds of locations and thousands of teleworkers. This makes it hard to assess the regional SaaS performance experience.
- Distributed platforms: You may think you’re connecting to mail.Google.com, but behind the scenes are dozens, sometimes hundreds of hosts and third-party services that support its functionality. Identifying which define the user experience for specific individuals or locations is a big-data problem.
- Geolocation-based redirections:It’s not uncommon for DNS or CASB proxies to direct users to SaaS hosts across the country–or another continent–even when there is a much closer host. BGP routing across the internet adds to route complexity and latency.
- SaaS apps are SPA: Not a therapeutic spa, a Single Page Application! Once the application loads, performance is dictated by transactions, queries and script execution more than content and page load metrics. This makes it difficult to capture the real user experience.
SaaS application performance is sensitive to latency and loss from any of the hosts involved, processing delays from CASB / SASE and secured gateways, network route and provider performance, browser and server processing time. The ability to monitor all aspects of the user experience is critical to identifying, isolating and resolving performance issues across this complex digital infrastructure.
Overcoming the SaaS performance visibility gap requires five key areas of insight: (1) real user experience from the employee / regional perspective, (2) continuous, segmented network path tracing, (3) real-time performance degradation detection and alerting, (4) guided diagnostics to quickly drill down to the underlying issue, (5) ability to pinpoint the infrastructure layer and location responsible
Once you’ve determined the source of the problem, you will also need to be able to verify if corrective actions resolved the issue. This is especially important when troubleshooting intermittent degradations that frequently impact remote employees using low bandwidth connections or ISPs with limited peering arrangements.
How can you monitor SaaS performance? Leading Fortune 1000 enterprises that have heavily adopted SaaS offer these key tips: (1) Use multiple monitoring methods - to effectively capture detailed network insight and the SaaS user experience for all employees, a combination of active network testing and browser-based digital experience monitoring is required, (2) Correlate different data sources — just as no single test approach captures all relevant data, neither does any particular infrastructure layer, host or location. Seeing things from multiple vantage points reveals the dependencies and bottlenecks that ultimately define SaaS application performance.
By correlating user experience degradations with network or host performance it’s quick to pinpoint which domain — or vendor — to address. For example, if your CASB security gateway is introducing significant latency or redirecting users to remote hosts, you can work with your provider (e.g. Zscaler or Netscope) to optimize proxy configuration.
By aligning different perspectives IT teams gain visibility into the SaaS user experience, and all domains and infrastructure that can impact it. This is a big data problem, especially difficult because rapid insight is key to troubleshooting transient or periodic issues. Automated, ML-based analytics are required to make sense of all this data in real-time
While SaaS performance often looks outside of the users’ control, it can be optimized with the right level of visibility. Legacy monitoring approaches are tripped up by encrypted traffic and highlight distributed hosts and users, especially since work from home became the new normal.
New approaches that look at the network and applications like your users do are helping IT organizations to deliver an amazing digital experience to employees, giving business productivity a boost, and their companies a competitive advantage in an increasingly digital marketplace.
*Statistics from: NTT Global Services report 2021, ESG insights, EMA, Digital Enterprise Journal and Workfront 2021
