Basic troubleshooting with the remote worker agent

[stefano]

Overview
In this post, I want to provide some basic troubleshooting steps to figure out remote end-user experience. I will simply list the series of steps that needs to be followed to identify the root cause.

If one step help identifying the root cause, then you can stop at that step. If that step doesn’t provide evidence of that being the root cause, then go to the next step.

Also, this procedure covers most of end-user complaints that tend to be related to WiFi, ISP, VPN, and LAN. There may be some other cases not covered here.

Procedure

1. In your web browser, enter the URL associated with your NetBeez dashboard

2. Go to the Agents tab and locate the user based on their laptop name or some other parameters. Select the “Remote Workers” sub-tab.

   

3. Click on the agent and inspect the status of the tests running:

   • If a test is marked as orange, then it has a performance issue undergoing, verify if it’s related to failure rate or response time.
   • If a test is marked as red, then there’s a total loss of service.
   

   In both cases, verify the associated target if other agents are reporting similar issues. To do that, go to the Targets page, and check if there’s an ongoing incident on that specific target. If that’s the case, then it’s most probably an application related issue.

4. If the previous step didn’t highlight an application issue (target incident), then continue the inspection by checking what interfaces are connected. When an interface is connect, you’ll see a green dot next to it.

   

5. If the wireless is connected, go to the Wireless sub-tab of that agent, and verify that the signal strength is more -70 dBm or less and the link quality is at least 75%. If the signal strength is less than -70 dBm and the link quality is less than 75%, then recommend the user to get closer to the access point, or wired in with an Ethernet cable.

   
   

6. Go to the “Scheduled tests” sub-tab of that agent and verify the speed test results: verify that there are no alerts and that download is more than 25 Mbps and upload is more than 3 Mbps.

   

7. Go back to the “General” sub-tab of that agent and check that the CPU utilization is not consistently staying above 70% and that the Disk space consumption hasn’t reached the 100%.