What is Network Performance Monitoring

What causes poor network performance

Outdated infrastructure: Hardware including switches, routers, cabling, and other components, needs maintenance and updates. An aging infrastructure can contribute to network slowness.

High traffic volumes: The demands of modern business operations can overwhelm the infrastructure. Video conferences, large file transfers, or backup operations can eat into the available bandwidth, again resulting in network slowness.

Misconfigured devices: Wrongly configured switches, firewalls, routers, or QoS policies can impact network connectivity, cause routing problems and device failures.

Poor physical connectivity: The state of physical connectors - like cabling - can also impact the network performance, causing loss of signal and unpredictable network drops.

Bandwidth-hogging applications: Lack of visibility or management of bandwidth allocation sometimes means non-essential or unauthorized applications will take up higher bandwidth, affecting business-critical applications' performance.

Poor network performance has direct impact on business operations

• Video calls drop or have poor quality
• Accessing the cloud, file transfers; all become time-consuming actions
• Productivity hit due to erratic uptime
• Reduced customer satisfaction and stickiness due to poor digital experience

When do organizations turn to network performance monitoring?

An organization functioning with little or no formal network monitoring practice in place in the modern era is rare and definitely not recommended by industry experts. Without network monitoring, you’re flying blind - unaware of vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, and network bottlenecks - only to be alerted by end users or disrupted business operations.

Organizations operating without any form of network monitoring are impossible to imagine in an era where size and scale, compliance and regulations, and cybersecurity-driven complexities and compulsions are higher than ever.

Network “performance” monitoring takes center stage when the question goes beyond “Is it up?”- bringing a deeper focus on metrics like latency, speed, reliability, and end-user experience. Scale (including hybrid cloud environments) can introduce blind spots, SLAs might demand a certain level of speed and performance as an outcome, and even from a security standpoint, declining performance can signal a potential threat. These are all reasons why organizations choose to implement stronger network performance monitoring capabilities.

Investing in strong network performance monitoring capabilities always pays off - here's how

User experience and productivity: The network powers the organization’s business operations, and the benefits are on two frontiers; employees and customers. Employees can focus on their daily objectives and solving problems, while customers can enjoy a frictionless experience when availing the organization’s services.

Reduced downtime and operational costs: Organizations of varying size and scale have ongoing operational cost budgets, with the goal of staying within them, even while accounting for contingencies. Downtime can cause operational costs to skyrocket in a short period. An efficient network performance monitoring practice helps prevent this.

Improved security through early threat detection: Abnormal traffic patterns, erroneous configuration changes, unrecognized devices are detected early, reducing the mean time to detect (MTTD). Faster detection leaves a smaller window for an attacker to exploit any vulnerability. In the event of a detection, a streamlined incident response can further bring down mean time to resolve (MTTR) as well.

Compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) and industry regulations: Organizations have uptime, latency, and reliability benchmarks promised as part of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Network performance monitoring, specifically tracking packet loss, bandwidth, and application response times, ensures there’s verifiable proof that performance levels are met. From a regulatory standpoint, whether it’s ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, telecom-specific mandates, or other frameworks- there’s often a requirement to demonstrate control over network availability, data integrity, and security. Logs, reports, and alerts are critical for proving compliance.

Implement comprehensive network performance monitoring with OpManager

OpManager is the ideal, comprehensive tool to implement the robust network performance monitoring practice your organization needs. It moves beyond simply asking "Is the network up?" to answer the critical questions of performance, reliability, and user experience from a single console.

Providing deep visibility and data collection: Leverages SNMP, WMI, and CLI protocols to continuously monitor the health and performance of your network devices, including routers, switches, firewalls, and servers. By analyzing flow data leveraging its NetFlow Analyzer add-on, OpManager can pinpoint exactly which applications and users are consuming the most bandwidth, directly addressing the issue of bandwidth-hogging applications causing network slowdowns.

Intelligent and automated alerting: Multi-level, threshold-based alerting engine ensures you receive meaningful notifications for performance deviations. This capability is crucial for reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), allowing your IT teams to address issues like high latency or packet loss before they impact business operations and breach SLAs.

Simplify complexities with powerful visualizations: OpManager translates complex network data into easy-to-understand, customizable dashboards and reports. Layer 2 network maps, business views, and automated reporting provide verifiable proof of performance for SLA compliance and help teams quickly diagnose problems related to misconfigurations or physical connectivity.

The comprehensive oversight not only reduces costly downtime and boosts user productivity but also strengthens your security posture by detecting anomalous traffic patterns that could signal a threat. With OpManager, you can build a resilient network that is dependable, efficient, and aligned with your business objectives.