One of my customers had issues with network performance accessing Dynamics CE application. We decided to use some network intelligence software to check what is the reason for slow connection as a connection from other locations was quite stable and fast. We recommended to set up and use Thousandeyes application, which also provides endpoint agents which can track network route directly from PCs of your users. Let’s review how to set up and use Thousandeyes agents to monitor your network performance and routing.
First of all, you need to set up your trial account on their website thousandeyes.com. There are several possibilities to track network performance. You can use cloud services provided by Thousandeyes so that Thousandeyes will ping your application and collect different information about network requests. Another option is to set up a special agent app which will collect all network information directly from client PC. This allows you to track network performance from your location. We used the second path as network performance was bad only from one place. Please use the following description to setup network agent: Configuring Endpoint Agent setup. Once the agent is installed, please be sure that you’ve also installed an extension for chrome. Without this extension, the agent will not collect the data. The extension can be downloaded from here: Endpoint Agent Extension. After installation, please go to Thousandeyes web site -> Endpoint agents and check that your agent is available under Agent Settings. Once you’ve installed the agent, you need to configure it. Go to EndPoint agents and then to Browser Session Setting. Add your Monitored Networks and Monitored Domain Sets. To monitor all networks, you can put range 0.0.0.0 – 255.255.255.255. Add appropriate domain set it should be something like this: somecrmapplicaiton.crm4.dynamics.com. Once finished, you can go to your Chrome browser and open a new tab. Activate the extension so it will start capturing data.
Navigate to your dynamics application and click several links. Then go back to Thousandeyes web site and check the statistics. To open statistics, go to Endpoint agents and then navigate to Views. You can play with statistics switching between Visited pages and Network. Under the Network section, you can check the network path visualization and check which part of the route had issues. You can also easily recognize where your CRM application is actually hosted. In the example below, it is Dublin.
Finally, we were able to recognize the problem as it was incorrectly configured VPN. I hope this app can help everyone who has network performance issues.