Modern networks are vast, complex infrastructures that need to sustain large applications like hosted VoIP, cloud-based ERP systems, firewalls, and more. With this demand comes many opportunities for your network to fail.
Since networks are often the backbone of businesses, it’s important to quickly find and fix network issues before they cause disastrous disruptions to your business. Luckily, you don’t have to carry this responsibility on your own, because this is where network performance monitoring comes in.
Today, we’ll be giving you an overview of the key benefits of network performance monitoring for individuals and businesses of all sizes.
What Is Network Performance Monitoring?
Network performance monitoring is a term that is now widely recognized among IT specialists and network engineers. It is the process of measuring and analyzing network metrics to define the quality of services offered by the underlying network. Network performance monitoring generally measures the service quality of a network, as seen by the end-user.
It can help you pinpoint and solve network issues before they start affecting users, to improve the end-user experience overall. Network performance monitoring should be continuous in order to be the most effective, which is why businesses turn to Network Performance Monitoring solutions to get the job done.
A tool, like Obkio Network Performance Monitoring software, will monitor end-to-end network performance for you, and notify you if problems arise, so you can be proactive and productive. Network performance monitoring with a software like Obkio is more than just device monitoring. Obkio discovers network issues anywhere along your complete network path. This is becoming more and more important with SaaS and SD-WAN infrastructures. Traditional network monitoring software does not have these same abilities.
Let’s look at more benefits in detail:
1. Pinpoint Network Slowdowns
Unlike traditional fault monitoring systems, network performance monitoring allows you to locate any network slowdowns and not just hard failures. Any performance degradation can be a sign of a much larger issue, so it’s important to find and fix them before it’s too late.
Network performance monitoring gives you the opportunity to be proactive, and understand what’s causing network slowdowns, so you can fix them before your users start experiencing them.
2. Troubleshoot Network Problems
As I mentioned earlier, it’s better to be proactive when it comes to network performance. But, many people turn to network performance monitoring to solve existing, intermittent network problems in emergency situations.
Network performance monitoring saves the day by helping businesses quickly and easily pinpoint the location and cause of a problem anywhere along their network. It allows businesses to gather all information about a network problem to understand where it’s located, what caused it, when it happened, and who is responsible for fixing it.
With all this information at their fingertips, businesses can easily troubleshoot network problems, whether they’re due to packet loss, bandwidth issues, or even physical connectivity problems.
3. Improve the End-User Experience
Like I talked about earlier, network performance is based on the network’s ability to meet a user’s expectations. If your users are experiencing choppy VoIP Quality, slow internet speeds, or VPN disconnection, it’s the best metric you have to determine that your network is performing poorly.
A continuous network performance monitoring solution can help businesses identify, locate, and solve issues before they start affecting end-users. With automatic alerting, a network performance monitoring solution will notify you of network performance degradation, before your users do. This ensures that users always receive the best user experience possible, and can work without any network disruptions.
4. Establish A Performance Baseline:
Network performance monitoring allows businesses to collect historical data to establish a baseline network performance level to easily compare ideal performance with below average. It also allows network administrators and service providers to go back in time to identify intermittent issues that may be hard to pinpoint, or may have happened in the past.
It essentially provides a variety of network data that businesses and individuals can use in multiple ways to optimize their networking infrastructure and business operations.
5. Monitor Remote Network Performance
With more and more businesses going remote in the current circumstances, monitoring network performance from a distance has become more complex. That’s why businesses are turning to modern network performance monitoring solutions to monitor network performance in multiple remote sites without local IT resources.
A remote network monitoring solution measures network performance and health in a decentralized manner, even across multiple remote locations. You can deploy network monitoring agents in key networks locations to allow your remote workers to measure their network performance between agents in their remote offices, up to your main network location, like a head office.
So if your remote workers start complaining of connections or slowdown, your IT team can troubleshoot and solve them, even from far.
In Conclusion
There are many benefits to network performance monitoring, which is why it’s become such a necessary practice for modern, growing businesses. From improving the end-user experience, identifying and fixing network issues, addressing the needs of remote workers, and collecting network data to optimize business performance, it is the key to a successful, efficient business.
With the reliance that modern businesses have on technology, specifically network performance, it’s better to be proactive when it comes to network performance. So, during your next executive meeting, make sure to add a network performance monitoring solution to the discussion.
