Monitoring an organization’s internal network can only provide so much operational insight in the age of cloud services and remote workers. To broaden administrators’ perspective, ThousandEyes Inc. is launching a new endpoint agent for its traffic tracking service that provides the ability to aggregate activity data from outside the firewall.

More specifically, the software is designed to run on employee computers and understand how they interact with company infrastructure. ThousandEyes says that its agent can identify whether a user is accessing a work application from the office or a remote location like a coffee shop, collect data about the local network and map out the components involved in making the connection. That includes most of everything from their organization’s VPN software to the various gateways and proxies on the network path.

The agent’s measurements are synchronized to a graphical monitoring console that ThousandEyes says acts as a map of employee connections. Administrators can centrally check on all the employees who are accessing company systems regardless of whether they’re in the office or at home. Moreover, the dashboard also provides the ability examine the connections of individual employees, which is tremendously useful for troubleshooting purposes.

The functionality makes it possible to immediately start the diagnostics process when someone complains about networking issues instead of having to painstakingly walk workers through a self-troubleshooting procedure. Help desktop personnel still need to pinpoint the specific issue at hand and come up with a fix, but the total amount of time involved in handling each support ticket is still reduced significantly. This means that IT managers are left with more resources to spend on other activities while users get to resume their work faster.

The new endpoint agent currently only supports desktops and laptops, but there’s a good chance that ThousandEyes will add mobile compatibility later down the road given the pervasiveness of smartphones in the enterprise. It’s designed to complement the company’s global network of “Cloud Agents”, which monitor carrier infrastructure to identify traffic bottlenecks that may impact user experience.

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