Proactive User Experience with ADEM

ADEM is highly useful for customers with a hybrid workforce; being able to get visibility into application and network performance no matter where your employees are is invaluable. On top of the visibility granted, ADEM is also the first product to be natively AI-powered by way of being built on the AIOps toolset also provided by Palo. Having this native functionality gives you a whole host of options to leverage such as anomaly detection, event correlation, root cause and impact, automatic and proactive remediation, as well as IT Service Management integration. To give you an idea of how this is all connected below is a diagram of the architecture. 

Why is this important

A significant challenge to many IT teams is the ticket volume that comes in related to network issues. A common scenario involves an employee or contractor being unable to connect to the internet or access a work application. They then must submit a ticket and wait for the IT team to investigate. During this downtime they are unable to do their job, all while the IT team is now spending its resources troubleshooting what the issue might be. Oftentimes, this requires escalation to specialized teams who manage the infrastructure related to this issue.  

With ADEM you can have your teams not only be able to proactively keep an eye on network and application health,  allowing them to address issues long before they are noticed by staff. Many times reported issues are the result of external factors, such as application issues with the SaaS provider, ISP outages upstream, or issues with the remote network a user is connected through. Many of these issues are resolved before the IT team is able to investigate leading to wasted time troubleshooting. Without proper tools providing historical data and detailed metrics IT teams are unable to confirm the cause and verify a resolution.

Notable features

Unified Dashboard

There is a single point of truth for both monitoring and managing the environment. From here, you can see incidents that are happening in real-time and drill down into each location to see what can be done from the dashboard itself and what needs to be handled outside of the business.

ADEM Self-Serve

Pushes notifications on the user's endpoint through the Global Protect agent that alerts users of detected issues, helping them resolve them themselves before reaching out to IT. Examples are poor or disconnected Wi-Fi, high resource usage on the CPU or memory, and ISP outages found downstream.

Real and synthetic tests

ADEM will use real connections users have with the application as well as synthetic tests up to applications from Prisma Access. This will allow you to see any outages before a user has a chance to experience them and make a ticket. These tests can be done through either the GP client on a user's machine or through an ION device at a remote site. 

Summary

With companies on the never-ending path of being more lean and efficient, ADEM allows you to be just that. The legacy way of being reactive to connection and employee experience issues no longer needs to be just the way it is. Being able to proactively catch, make adjustments, and not spend your IT resources on chasing down problems that are either no longer an issue, something simple, or outside of your ability to resolve means that you can use those same resources for other more important areas of your business. Saving money and getting more from the products you already have. 

While this might seem like just a nice thing to have, as someone who has worked at the helpdesk and made my way through the ranks to a systems engineer and network engineer, I would not have had nearly the stress from after-hours or weekend calls, Had I had access to this level of visibility and the ability to resolve or notify the business of issues before they became widespread.

While this is an overview of ADEMs usefulness a demo going into detail will help build a stronger picture of how powerful of a tool this is for your business. Reach out to either your WWT sales team or your Palo account team to set up a deeper dive