Network Packet Loss Monitoring is an integral part of network monitoring. The key steps to understanding and fixing packet loss are measuring its existence accurately, pinpointing exactly what is causing the latency, and maintaining a healthy network. These tasks are accomplished with OpManager, the comprehensive network performance monitoring tool that ensures all your network devices are up and running 24/7.
Causes of network packet loss
Packet loss can be caused by any or a combination of the following:
6majorcauses
- Network Congestion: When network traffic hits maximum capacity, packets have to wait to be delivered. Packets are the first thing to be left behind when a network is trying to catch up with traffic and the connection can only handle so much data.
- Problems with network hardware: Hardware that is old, or otherwise outdated, can significantly weaken your network. Firewalls, routers, and network switches all take up a considerable amount of power. If your company grows but your hardware capabilities don’t expand with it, you could experience increased packet loss or even total connectivity loss.
- Software bugs: Unchecked bugs in your network devices can disrupt network performance, and prevent it from sufficiently carrying packets leading to packet loss issues.
- Overloaded devices: Overloaded devices on your network means devices are running at a higher capacity than they were designed to handle. Sometimes packets on overutilized devices make it to their destinations, but by then the network is too weak to process the packets and send them back out. Many devices have buffers in place to put packets in holding patterns until they can be sent out. However, these buffers can get filled up quickly, and excess packets are still dropped which causes packet loss.
- Security threats: We also cannot ignore the possibility of someone deliberately tampering with your network to cause packet loss. Packet drop attacks have become popular with cybercriminals in recent years. Es