Network performance can be a difficult topic for IT departments to address if service degradation problems are difficult to identify. How do you address a problem without understanding its cause?

Slow performance on your network can become IT’s Achilles heel if your choice of network performance monitoring method is wanting.

With all things interconnected today, the average person consumes considerably more bandwidth than say, ten years ago. Applications, operating systems, updates, video, voice. You name it; it wants bandwidth.

Network managers need to identify areas that present obstacles to allowing IT to provide businesses with optimised services and meet SLAs. Network performance monitoring allows you to proactively address potential causes of service degradation.

Make sure your performance monitoring tools give you:

• A baseline with which to measure information against. Be sure you have a baseline that is accurate and serves as the yardstick against which you monitor your hardware and environment at large.
• A lightweight monitoring process that doesn’t cause further performance issues on the network. Some monitoring applications require CPU and memory resources of their own, which can prove problematic. Ensure your monitoring is as lightweight as possible.
• Flexibility. You may want to tune your network performance monitoring tool to measure only certain metrics or specify certain time windows for monitoring. You may even want to disable monitoring of certain hardware during specific times of the day. A flexible tool will give you these options and more.
• Scalability means that your performance monitor will grow with your network. With the fluid nature of the IT industry, system changes and upgrades mean that networks usually look quite different than what they did a year or two prior. This means you have more nodes with varying underlying attributes to monitor. Your monitoring solution should be adaptable and scalable to accommodate this.

Network monitoring beats network troubleshooting, any day.

Performance problems can arise from anywhere and the blame isn’t always found at your service provider’s door. Ensure that you have your finger on the pulse of all your hardware and the critical applications and services required for your business to function. A detailed representation of your environment gives you the complete perspective you need to keep ahead in the game. 

Big networks, big data

Today’s networks face much higher demands with large amounts of traffic passing through them. IT Managers need to constantly adjust their approach to cater for demand – sometimes at very short notice. It’s fair to say that the request for speed and volume is increasing fast and networks need to meet that challenge.

Network performance monitoring tools should be measured against their ability to provide IT operations with easy-to-consume data collected from various nodes on the environment in both real-time and over extended periods; without coming at a cost to resources.

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