NetMotion Wireless yesterday announced the availability of NetMotion Diagnostics for Mobility, which enables first-level diagnostic mobile virtual-private-network (VPN) testing that is designed to streamline connectivity troubleshooting for users and technical-support personnel.

With the announcement, NetMotion Wireless will rebrand its Locality product, which provides performance-monitoring functions for mobile VPN connections, according to Tracy Crowe, director of product marketing at NetMotion Wireless.

“What would have been Locality 3.0, we’re introducing as NetMotion Diagnostics, with the key feature being that we’re adding diagnostics and alerting to Locality,” Crowe said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications, noting that the company will continue to support existing Locality customers.

Key features of NetMotion Diagnostics include greater integration with NetMotion Mobility—the company’s mobile VPN offering—and the ability to perform diagnostic tests that will allow users and IT staff to identify quickly the source of problems, Crowe said.

“We are going to do this battery of tests that basically tests from the device’s adapter and its ability to do local area routing all the way back to the corporate resource, whether it be a corporate server, agency server or a third-party server because it’s a hosted solution,” he said. “We’re providing a great deal of information at the click of a button that previously required an IT person to run six or seven different scripts—and that’s assuming that person with the device was technical enough to understand how to run those scripts.”

“On top of that, we give you a set of customizable tests to check on name resolution, make sure that your applications and security servers are up and running.”

For the user, the results of the tests are summarized in a simple, color-coded display, although a detailed report also is available. If connectivity exists, these findings can be transmitted to technical-support staff. If there is a connectivity problem, the results are simple enough that they can be communicated quickly, Crowe said.

“At the very least, if they can’t connect, they can call IT and say, ‘I ran diagnostics. I got the following green checks, one yellow triangle and two red circles. Here’s what they say,’” Crowe said. “Now, all of a sudden, troubleshooting is significantly more efficient, because it’s not the typical trial-and-error approach in which IT asks, ‘How many bars do you have? Did you try Wi-Fi? Did you try this?’”

The simplicity of the NetMotion Diagnostics approach can impact how quickly a connectivity problem can be resolved, particularly when the field user is under time pressures, Crowe said.