How NetBeez Agents Turn Continuous Measurements into Fault-Domain Evidence

Panos takes a hands-on look at how NetBeez continuously measures network experience across branch offices, Wi-Fi networks, and remote workers. Using the NextGen interface and Buzz dashboard, he will show how teams can identify degraded experience, understand emerging and recurring issues, and isolate the likely fault domain using evidence collected from the user’s perspective. The live scenarios will include a Wi-Fi access point failure and a shared VPN-path degradation affecting remote users. NetBeez co-founder Panos Vouzis led the demonstration at Networking Field Day 41.

Vouzis described the full agent lineup. It includes Raspberry Pi-based appliances, VM and container agents hosted on SD-WAN equipment or in the cloud, hardware Wi-Fi sensors, and remote worker agents for endpoints. All of them run the same synthetic tests, covering latency, jitter, packet loss, HTTP response time, VoIP quality scoring, and speed tests. Vouzis said the Wi-Fi sensor is hardware by design: a stationary, identical device allows objective comparisons across days and sites and also reports RF conditions. In the first scenario, a wireless-only sensor in the Barcelona office showed latency and packet loss spiking around 10 a.m. At the same moment, its signal strength fell as it roamed from the nearby access point to a distant one. A Wi-Fi scan from the sensor found only one of the office’s two access points broadcasting, which confirmed the failure. In the second scenario, the VPN card flagged three remote users. Their round-trip times held steady while packet loss reached about 10 percent, which pointed to the VPN concentrator.

Delegates raised concerns about agent sprawl. Vouzis said campus customers typically rely on hardware sensors, while endpoint agents suit smaller groups such as call center staff, traveling attorneys, and executives. He added that the endpoint agent uses a fraction of a percent of CPU and roughly 30 to 40 MB of memory. NetBeez offers both SaaS and on-premises deployment and supports customer-managed encryption keys. It can retain data for up to two years and can trigger alerts from deviations against a custom baseline. For zero-trust environments, Vouzis suggested placing an agent at the VPN infrastructure alongside the laptop agent to get an end-to-end view. Both scenarios ended the same way: once the fix was applied, the same continuous measurements would confirm a return to baseline.