The primary objective of network performance monitoring is to ensure the availability and health of the IT network. However, with modern networks, emerging organizational challenges, and evolving monitoring solutions to meet those demands, the list of use cases has expanded beyond basic availability checks. Let's look at some of the key scenarios where network performance monitoring proves indispensable.
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For voice and video calls to work smoothly, networks must prioritize this sensitive traffic. Without monitoring, issues like packet drops and jitter can lead to poor call quality, frustrating both employees and customers. NPM tools continuously monitor call-related error metrics. This proactive approach helps industries like call centers and healthcare spot when quality is slipping and resolve issues before they impact service.
When a critical edge router goes down, a network performance monitoring tool can instantly detect the outage and trigger an automated workflow. A secondary check validates the failure to avoid false alarms. Once confirmed, the workflow automatically reroutes traffic through a redundant link to maintain availability. Simultaneously, stakeholders are notified, and a ticket is created in the help desk system for further investigation and permanent resolution.
When employees complain that a SaaS tool feels “slow,” it’s not always the application’s fault. A performance monitoring tool can look at network traffic patterns, error rates, and routing behavior to confirm if the slowdown comes from the network or the app.
This is vital for tech, e-commerce, and education organizations where SaaS is business-critical.
Modern enterprises rely on SD-WAN to route traffic across multiple internet paths. Network performance monitoring ensures that path changes happen as intended during outages or congestion.
By keeping an eye on device health, network path, and traffic reroutes, businesses like retailers, manufacturers, and logistics providers can trust that their SD-WAN policies are actually delivering.
In simple terms, the edge is the boundary where your internal network connects with the outside world- like your ISP, cloud provider, or remote branch. It’s the “entry and exit point” of your network, where traffic either leaves your infrastructure or comes into it. Monitoring performance at the edge is crucial because many issues- like bandwidth congestion, BGP flaps, or cloud interconnect failures- first appear here before impacting the rest of the network.
If your organization depends on global connectivity, routing protocols like BGP determine how your traffic travels across the internet. Network performance monitoring involves visibility into session stability, route changes, and error trends, enabling early detection if your ISP's path is behaving poorly and engage them before it impacts users.
This is especially relevant for service providers, CDNs, and gaming companies.
Networks don’t suddenly fail - they gradually hit their limits. By analyzing 95th-percentile utilization, busy-hour usage, queue drop patterns, and top talkers from flow data, IT teams can anticipate saturation before it impacts users. With this foresight, organizations can right-size links or tune QoS policies to keep performance steady.
Telecom providers, universities, government, and large enterprises benefit most, avoiding costly surprises and ensuring consistent end-user experience.
Every change - whether it’s a firmware upgrade, configuration change, or routing policy push - carries risk. Monitoring pre- and post-change interface utilization, error rates, queue behavior, and routing diffs helps validate whether performance improved or degraded. If problems arise, rollbacks can be triggered immediately.
In regulated industries like finance, healthcare, energy, or government, this kind of evidence-based validation ensures compliance and minimizes downtime caused by misconfigured changes.
With more people working remotely, VPN gateways and links have become lifelines. Monitoring CPU load, tunnel counts, and drop rates helps IT teams find out if bottlenecks come from the gateway itself or the uplink.
This ensures smooth connectivity for professional services, BPOs, and engineering firms.
Network performance monitoring solution proactively detects a datacenter’s temperature sensor in Rack 7 has exceeded safe limits. A comprehensive network visualization suite will have "Rack view", where the faulty rack will be seen in red. An automated workflow triggers an auxiliary probe to verify the reading (to avoid false alerts). Once confirmed, HVAC controls are instructed to boost cooling in that zone. Simultaneously, a notification is sent to the facilities/on-site team to resolve the issue.
Service providers and carriers often commit to SLAs, but it’s up to enterprises to measure them. By calculating compliance using metrics like availability, error rates, queue drops, and utilization across sites or providers, IT can hold vendors accountable with evidence. These reports also validate whether internal SLOs are being met.
Enterprises with strict carrier SLAs, MSPs, retailers, and healthcare networks use this data to ensure promises translate into real-world performance.
| Challenge / scenario | OpManager’s capabilities |
|---|---|
| VoIP and communications quality | OpManager uses Cisco IP SLA UDP jitter tests to simulate call paths and track MOS, jitter, latency, and packet loss. Dashboards and alerts ensure crystal-clear communication for call centers, healthcare, and finance. Netflow add-on in OpManager brings traffic correlation, deep packet inspection, helping troubleshoot QoS and bandwidth-related issues impacting calls. |
| Device outage and automated remediation | OpManager’s comprehensive device monitoring instantly detects when a critical router, switch, or server goes down. Automated workflows verify the outage with secondary probes to avoid false positives and can trigger corrective actions like restarting services or rerouting traffic. Through seamless integration with third-party help desk tools, tickets are auto-created with diagnostic details, ensuring stakeholders are notified and downtime is minimized. |
| Diagnosing “slow” SaaS | OpManager correlates device health, interface errors, and routing behavior, to confirm if SaaS slowness stems from the network or application. IP SLA and path analysis pinpoint external vs internal issues. |
| SD-WAN overlay/underlay oversight | OpManager monitors SD-WAN controllers and edge devices using templates, path analysis, and IP SLA tests to validate intended failovers or reroutes. NetFlow add-on brings application-level visibility, confirming whether traffic policies behave correctly during congestion. This ensures predictable, policy-driven application performance for retailers, logistics, and manufacturing companies relying on SD-WAN. |
| Internet and BGP path health | OpManager’s BGP monitoring tracks peer up/down, flap events, update counts, and anomalies with alerts for instability. Historical graphs support proactive engagement with ISPs or peers before customers notice. |
| Capacity planning with forecasting | OpManager provides utilization reports and ML-based forecast trends to predict network saturation. NetFlow-add-on enhances this with 95th-percentile style planning, top talkers, and queue/drop metrics. |
| Validating network changes | OpManager supports pre/post comparisons of utilization, errors, and routing stats to validate changes. The NCM add-on integrates with OpManager to provide configuration backups, compliance reports, and change diffs, enabling safe rollbacks. This reduces downtime and ensures secure, evidence-based change management in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and government. |
| Remote access and VPN performance | Discover and monitor VPN tunnels across vendors such as Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto. OpManager tracks bandwidth, CPU, tunnel counts, and stability, helping IT pinpoint whether bottlenecks stem from gateways or uplinks. |
| Data center monitoring | OpManager’s data center monitoring suite provides rack-level visualization and monitors environmental devices like PDUs and temperature sensors. When unsafe conditions are detected, workflows validate readings across sensors and trigger automated corrective actions such as HVAC adjustments. On-site team receive instant notifications, and incident tickets are logged in desk systems. This integration ensures data center uptime, prevents hardware failures, and safeguards the heart of business infrastructure. |
| Proving SLA/SLO compliance | OpManager’s IP SLA and VoIP modules track latency, jitter, MOS, and availability metrics. Reports and adaptive thresholds simplify SLA validation. Enterprises use OpManager to hold carriers accountable and measure internal service delivery against compliance benchmarks. |
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