Before hybrid workspace became an office buzzword, managing your AV systems and technology used to be as simple as understanding which cables plugged into which receptacles. Now that hybrid work is here to stay, ensuring uptime, addressing issues and empowering employees is not as simple as a walk down the hall. Your employees are working both in the office and in their homes, making AV monitoring more challenging than ever. Thankfully, new software solutions can help you proactively support your teams and technology. Let’s look at ways you can unify your AV and tech support across your company’s footprint.
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What Is AV Monitoring?
Why Is AV Monitoring Important? What Are the Benefits of AV Monitoring?
What Helpful Data and Analytics Can AV Monitoring Provide?
What AV Monitoring Solutions Can Do Post Implementation?
Is AV Monitoring Right for My Business?
What Is AV Monitoring?
AV monitoring is the practice of overseeing, tracking and reporting on AV endpoints and infrastructure, managed by an organization’s IT team. The goals of a successful AV monitoring strategy are to ensure uptime, proactively diagnose technical issues and help troubleshoot problems identified by end-users. AV monitoring provides insight and access to remote devices on an individual and global basis. An AV monitoring strategy helps minimize downtime, maximize employee productivity and provide a line of sight for senior leadership into the organization’s tech and teams. AV Monitoring solutions provide customized monitoring dashboards, advanced AV network reporting, and global AV management API integration.
Why Is AV Monitoring Important? What Are the Benefits of AV Monitoring?
Audio visual technology plays a huge role in the success of today’s organizations. Imagine if, just before a big sales meeting, a conference room camera, mic or critical platform like Zoom malfunctions, requiring a time-sensitive update. AV monitoring helps you stay ahead of those challenges, saving time and money. An AV monitoring solution software offers one place to view all information about AV networks and devices, offering powerful features to help monitor AV network and device health and fix issues with remote power management and device access. With a successful AV monitoring software in place, IT teams are free to focus on day-to-day activities.
AV monitoring offers widespread benefits. It can help with:
- Helpdesk productivity
- Proactive maintenance to prevent equipment failure
- Usage statistics to influence future decisions
- Ability to manage AV devices across multiple VLANs and subnets
- Optimizing or configuring current software
- Utilization of conference room booking
- Alerts for changes to the AV network or issues with network performance
What Helpful Data and Analytics Can AV Monitoring Provide?
An integrated AV Monitoring solution can analyze AV devices across multiple VLANs and subnets. Your team receives alerts for changes to the AV network or issues with network performance. External host monitoring, WIFI access points and clients can also be implemented along with security camera monitoring to analyze non-network protocols, historical data aggregation, device response time, power management for switches and PDUs.
AV monitoring also helps you stay up-to-date with inventory. In the past, your team needed an asset tag sticker and a spreadsheet to stay organized. Now, with just a few clicks, you can view your entire hardware inventory and how your AV devices are performing from a single customized dashboard.
What AV Monitoring Solutions Can Do Post Implementation?
Historically, AV monitoring was limited to on-site staff, replacing a faulty HDMI cord, or reinstalling a driver for a key piece of hardware. Now that so many more employees are off-site, support must also be deployed remotely. Thankfully, there are software services to help with both remote and on-site AV monitoring.
If you have a device with an IP address on your network, DGI offers platforms to monitor it so you can track devices across multiple VLANs, SNMP variables, any ports or services. These solutions often use reliable Fing technology, which leverages artificial intelligence to unite digital devices remotely. With these solutions you can monitor network and device health and fix issues before they affect your bottom line with remote power management and device access.
Finally, DGI can help with solutions to focus specifically on video conferencing monitoring. These systems monitor the components that make up your video collaboration ecosystem. This includes cross-vendor products and technology types such as IoT, USB and AV. The application provides automatic self-healing capabilities unprecedented in the industry. This dramatically shrinks the number of “trouble tickets” generated, creating order and logic out of chaos.
Is AV Monitoring Right for My Business?
AV Monitoring software gives you a view of the “pins in the map,” displaying where your employees and devices are at any given time. It gives your team one place to view all information about networks and devices instead of using bits and pieces of different software.
AV monitoring can be a valuable addition to any business as part of a broader unified communications and AV integration plan. For on-site and remote teams, large auditorium and small conference rooms, an AV monitoring solution can help your organization. Trusted companies like DGI are helping businesses of all sizes to make sense of their AV game-plan, including how to reduce costs and maximize productivity. Contact us to formulate an AV monitoring strategy that works for you.
