Frequently Asked Questions
Installing an agent decreases your available agent bundle count by one
You can increase your available agent bundle count manually by uninstalling and purging an agent in the UI
Agents bundle counts are automatically incremented when no results are seen for an agent for a month
Additional agent bundles can be purchased as your grow.
Enterprise and service provider solution customers can cancel within 30 days of ordering and you will receive a full refund. To do this, just open a support ticket with the subject of 30 Day Cancellation and we will action it and confirm back with you. We will ask what made you cancel so we can be sure to address the issue for future customers but we will never say "no".
Home Assessment services only last a short time so cancellation is usually not relevant. If you have an exception to this norm, please do contact us and we will work out how best to help. Our general approach is that if you have started getting reports with results then we are reluctant to entertain requests to cancel these home services. However if you have had issues getting to 'value' then we have no problem cancelling and making a refund.
All other service agreements are annual arrangements so you can cancel the next renewal at any time
Enterprise and service provider solution customers can cancel within 30 days of ordering and you will receive a full refund. To do this, just open a support ticket with the subject of 30 Day Cancellation and we will action it and confirm back with you. We will ask what made you cancel so we can be sure to address the issue for future customers but we will never say "no".
Home Assessment services only last a short time so cancellation is usually not relevant. If you have an exception to this norm, please do contact us and we will work out how best to help. Our general approach is that if you have started getting reports with results then we are reluctant to entertain requests to cancel these home services. However if you have had issues getting to 'value' then we have no problem cancelling and making a refund.
All other service agreements are annual arrangements so you can cancel the next renewal at any time
Like most technology companies we believe our solution is pretty unique however there are many ways to crack a nut so we discuss a few here in these FAQs.
Let's start by describing where our solution fits: We created proxyNM to help figure out what kind of digital experiences people were getting from the combination of their computer, local and wide area (ISP, VPN, private network etc) and applications. There are often many applications accessed in different ways. We don't assume we own the apps or the computer, we don't assume the person is our employee or our customer. We don't want to control or configure the computer. For security reasons we don't want to snoop, spy or sniff the customer's data.
Wire Data/DPI: Wire-data and deep packet inspection tools need to be installed in the network path and look at data whizzing by. They sniff that data and determine performance based on what they see. They can often determine network performance and to a lesser extent, application performance. Modern SSL/TSL will hide a lot of application performance details from these tools. No platform (computer) performance details are available and, of course, they need to be installed in the network path which can be difficult in terms of topology.
APM & Log data: Owners of applications can instrument their application and capture application and systems logs to provide measures of application responsiveness. This approach can help the developers of applications and we would argue this is an entirely appropriate thing to do. They do not provide network and platform (computer) measures and are hard to share so they are usually only of use to the owner and developer of an application. SaaS and cloud based applications owned by others cannot be instrumented by end user companies so this approach is not relevant to many enterprise and service provider groups that might consider proxyNM
APM RUM: Some APM providers extend their measures to the browser using an application plugin/library called RUM (Real User Management) which can add some implied network measures to the mix - there is still a constraint that measures are only available for the instrumented applications but this is at least a technique that can offer some visibility into SaaS and cloud based applications
RMM: Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools are focused more on the management of, and access to, remote computers. They tend to have very few synthetic capabilities and will normally just forward the basic operating system measures and event logs to a central location. There is very little network and application performance testing capability. What also comes with them is the ability to patch, reboot and remotely access these computers and, while that can be appealing, it may not be acceptable or desirable if you don't own the computer or employ the user. Even if you do, the security implications of this approach are troublesome. Often these RMM tools require a framework such as Java or .Net to be installed which is not an option in many use cases.
SpeedTest: SpeedTest by Ookla is a good example of a basic browser based network performance too. It will measure latency and upload/download throughput to a nearby test server. They do not measure platform performance or application performance and do not assess more detailed network performance measures. These tools will run when you tell them to run - they will not run on a schedule so performance over time is not visible. Results are available to end users but not to a central site. These are useful tools to see how the network delay and upload/download performance looks at this instant in time.
Our three offerings aim to serve very different markets. Namely:
Home users - users that need help to improve their own (of their family's) digital experiences when working (or playing) from home. Frustration and an understanding of who can help improve matters is a big driver of their 'why'
Enterprises - business of different sizes that need to improve the digital-experiences their users experience - or endure! Productivity, staff retention and Covid19 are a big part of their 'why'!
Service-providers - telecoms or managed service providers that need a secure and unobtrusive way of seeing, managing and improving their part of the digital experiences they deliver to their customers. Demarcation and differentiation is a big driver of their 'why'.
A major retailer of mobile phone services with over 400 stores nationwide implemented our proxyNM Enterprise solution.
Each store had several Windows or macOS machines for use by staff when selling or signing up new customers.
Agents were deployed to over 3500 store based computers and testing of computer, local network, VPN, internet access and application availability and performance was started.
Results were used by network and IT operations to know about store issues and to troubleshoot performance problems.
Interestingly result were also used by sales management when reviewing sales performance. The ranked-performance of digital-experience at each store allowed the quick identification, or dismissal, of poor sales performance due to store based technology challenges.
"We would have hit our store's sales numbers last month but the ordering system was running slow" could now be addressed or disproved!
Keen to differentiate their services, a service provider serving the SME market implemented our proxyNM Service-Provider solution so they could 'see' the performance their customers were experiencing
Customers were offered the option to install an agent on on or more of their office based computers at no extra charge. Our Beacon feature was used to ensure tests only ran while the agent was sure it was on the service-provider network thus eliminating irrelevant results from home, coffee shops or mobile services.
Customers reporting issues are able to describe any issues to the service provider who can now quickly see and demarcate responsibility as well as compare performance over time and performance between computers to see if and when various performance measures had changed.
A major national law firm keen to allow, and support, their staff to work from home implemented our Enterprise proxyNM solution so they could better understand and support their largely non-techhie staff members while they were working remotely.
Staff installed agents on their laptops and tests were performed to show the performance of their computers, home networks, ISP network and key applications.
Results allowed three main benefits:
1. Proactive support from IT operations to staff members with chronic tech-performance issues at home
2. Better support and isolation of issues when staff members called for help with tech-issues at home
3. Comparisons of staff's home tech-environments to a) create a hit list or poor performers that needed help getting better home or ISP networks and b) create a simple 'minimum standards' criteria for staff that wish to work from home.
Staff liked the extra support but also felt safe in the knowledge that their employer could not 'spy' or 'snoop' on them through the proxyNM solution.
A national franchise network implemented our Enterprise proxyNM solution in support of their network of franchisees.
All manner of IT issues were being presented to the franchisor support team by their franchisees and perception of the franchise IT systems were being damaged by incorrect franchisee diagnosis of issues.
The franchisor offered a single agent to each franchisee at not charge and used our solution to to quickly demarcate issues and prove that in most cases performance issues were down to the franchisee's computer, home network or ISP rather than due to the franchisor-provided systems.
They were then able to help the franchisees by suggesting who may be at fault and thus who they could contact for support and could provide supporting evidence. The were also able to help the franchisees determine if the issues had been resolved and acceptable performance had been restored.
They have subsequently used our solution to create a franchise standard for computer, home network, and ISP performance and also use our solution to benchmark new franchisees directly after recruitment/signup. Next they want to implement 'heads-up' notifications to franchises who's digital experiences are falling below the agreed minimum-standard so they can get to work restoring decent performance.
We offer a number of additional test types over and above the standard tests deployed in our service offerings. These tests are continually growing as we develop additional capabilities.
We can also develop custom tests.
A sample of some of these extra/custom tests include:
Time and Timezone accuracy test - built to ensure a cohort of users' computers are all running accurately sync'ed clocks and are configured in the correct timezones. This was initially developed for a customer who's desktop application took transaction timestamps from the local computer clock.
HTTP test - built to allow more sophisticated testing of applications including the login-transact-logout cycle. While we do not wish to become a APM or RUM solution (see alternatives FAQ on this page) there are some Enterprise needs to be able to do a little application transaction testing to gain insight into remote end-user experiences.
Voice Scoring - built to allow the scoring of IP telephone voice quality for remote users.
Email tests - built to test POP and SMTP based email delivery and performance.
Web-Services tests - built to allow a component based testing approach to key web-services required by mobile apps or web applications.
Cloud Storage test - built to allow the performance and availability of cloud based storage services such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, Apple iCloud, Google Drive and MS Azure/OneDrive.
Process Count Test - a test that counts the number of processes running on a remote computer. This was built for a retail customer running windows based POS systems and wanting to know if the very precise number of processes required for normal operation was actually running.
Process Presence Test - a test that checks process names against a list or pattern. This was built for a national transportation customer running computer based information terminals. This test allowed them to ensure key processes were running.
File Checksum Test - this test checks the checksum of a list of files. Used to ensure that no local changes have been applied to application critical files. This was deployed by an enterprise customer needing to ensure that local copies of boilerplate legal documentation were intact.
Our standard service offerings offer support for agents on Windows and MacOS operating systems.
Agents are also available on request for a number of Linux operating systems.
We have the ability to deploy agents on a small appliance (a very small computer) about the size of a packet of cigarettes.
This agent appliance plug into power (it is USB powered) and into an ethernet port and self provisions.
We can then run any tests to/from the agent appliance.
It is useful in unmanned sites or sites where no computer is available for agent installs.
We have deployed these in support of Service Provider pre-qualification, chronic troubleshooting and in unmanned mining operations
Reference agents can be deployed to act as a benchmark or comparison in GUI or PDF based reports. As well as defined thresholds, we can show the results from reference agents along side results from individual end-user agents.
Configurable beacons can help us control where and when tests are performed.
Telecoms Service providers can optionally use a beacon to automatically figure out if an end-user's agent is on their network - thus ensuring results are about the network for which we are responsible.
Enterprises can optionally use a beacon to automatically figure out if an end-user's agent is communication on their corporate VPN - thus ensuring results are related to the corporate environment
Additional agent bundles can be added to any of our service offerings. These can be bundles of tens, hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of agents.
As well as a browser based UI, enterprise and service provider service offerings can be augmented with timed PDF reports. These can be used internally or can be scheduled to be sent to end users.
Once deployed and understood, performance thresholds can be configured and alerts/reports can be configured to fire automatically on the breach of these thresholds. Alerts can be sent by a number of methods including SNMP, Email, WebHook, Slack and others.
On demand self service testing is a popular costs saving and differentiation approach for our service provider customers. Self service can be triggered through web applications, integrations with SaaS such as ServiceNow or JIRA and integration with smart devices like Alexa and Google Home/Nest