Palo Alto Networks and Zoom Deliver Exceptional Insight into Meeting Experience

Post-pandemic, as organizations worldwide return only partially to offices, it is clear that Zoom will continue to be an indispensable communications platform. In order to meet the continued demand for reliable and high-quality video conferencing, customers have asked for not just visibility, but actionable insights into the infrastructure bottlenecks impacting meeting issues across their organizations. Finding and resolving these bottlenecks is a priority because meeting performance and service disruptions don't simply interrupt work; they interrupt relationships. Missing a critical piece of information in a client meeting, video freezing during a presentation, or being late to an important meeting due to connectivity issues doesn't just cost a couple of minutes of productivity. These problems can erode connections and, in some cases, reputation.

There are countless variables between an end user and the Zoom service that can potentially degrade the meeting experience. A user can be sitting too far away from their Wi-Fi router. Their laptop can be struggling with a memory issue or there could be a problem with their home internet connection. Identifying the root cause of an issue can be more complicated than one might imagine, and when the average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute according to Gartner, minutes add up quickly. This is why Palo Alto Networks worked with Zoom to offer per-minute visibility into a user’s meeting experience and unprecedented root-cause analysis to quickly identify the source of performance issues.

Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) from Palo Alto Networks is the first product of its kind to integrate with Zoom's recently released Quality of Service Subscription (QSS). ADEM correlates the comprehensive data it generates with the near-real-time performance data available through QSS to identify the root cause of every minute of endpoint, network, and application performance issues. The new organization-wide views of Zoom experience in ADEM make it easy and fast for administrators to report on and improve user experience.

Figure 1: Have an organization-wide into Zoom performance and the top bottlenecks

ADEM, part of  Prisma SASE  from Palo Alto Networks, monitors the performance of every segment that can impact a user’s digital experience - devices, WiFi signal strength, LAN performance, ISP performance, Prisma Access performance, and application availability. ADEM helps IT admins find and resolve performance issues that users encounter while working from home, in the office, and traveling. Unlike other digital experience monitoring (DEM) solutions, ADEM doesn't just provide visibility; it interprets the results of synthetic tests and endpoint monitoring to surface actionable insights.

Figure 2: Here you see a month of the author’s call performance data: "I’ve got a LAN exit latency/jitter issue due to congestion on my home network."

Zoom and ADEM have a natural synergy. Both are market-leading solutions that focus on performance, scale, security, and reliability. No other monitoring solutions can deliver robust, scalable, performant underlying technology necessary to monitor traffic in real-time like ADEM. Zoom offers a ground-breaking application-layer quality of service data points, custom protocols, and unparalleled usability. Both offerings are a natural choice for customers who care deeply about user experience and security. By working together, we empower our customers to deliver exceptional user experiences.

Ready to learn more about ADEM? Check out our website.