How to Troubleshoot Network Issues
In Summary
Experiencing network issues is inevitable - but they don’t need to derail your entire work day. The faster you troubleshoot network problems, the quicker you can get back to peak productivity. In this article, we’re teaching you how to troubleshoot network issues using Network Troubleshooting tools.
Table of Contents 
- What is Network Troubleshooting?
- Deploy a Network Monitoring Software
- Collect Network Performance Data
- Perform a Network Assessment
- Identify Network Problems
- Contact Your Service Provider
- Simplify Network Troubleshooting
The Network Troubleshooting Series
If you're unfamiliar with the difference between Traditional Fault Monitoring tools and Network Monitoring, or the theory behind Network Diagnostics and Network Troubleshooting, check out our other articles in the series:
- Network Fault Monitoring vs. Network Performance Monitoring
- What is Network Troubleshooting
- Network Diagnostics with Obkio
- How to Troubleshoot Network Issues (this article)
What is Network Troubleshooting?
Briefly, let’s go over what network troubleshooting is and how it can help you.
Network troubleshooting is the combined processes of identifying, locating, and resolving network issues located anywhere along your network.
Combined with Network Monitoring and Network Assessments, it's a logical process network professionals use to collect information about a network problem (when, what, where) to resolve them and improve network performance.
We talk about this more in depth in another article on Network Assessment for A Successful IT Migration or Deployment.
Watch Obkio's on-demand webinar to learn how to find and troubleshoot live network issues using Obkio’s Network Monitoring app.
Watch On-Demand
1. Deploy a Network Monitoring Software
So your users are complaining about poor network performance - what now?
Before you can even begin to troubleshoot network issues, you need a tool to help you understand what the network problems are, and what’s causing them.
The easiest way to troubleshoot network issues is by using a Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting like Obkio.
Obkio continuously monitors end-to-end network performance with synthetic traffic using Network Monitoring Agents.
These Monitoring Agents monitor all ends of your network to identify network problems and collect the information to help you troubleshoot.
Use Obkio’s free trial and Getting Started Tutorial to begin.
Start monitoring network performance and troubleshooting network problems with Obkio!
Start for Free
2. Collect Network Performance Data
Once you’ve deployed Obkio Monitoring Agents in your key network locations, they will start measuring key network metrics like jitter, packet loss, and latency and displaying them on Obkio’s Network Response Time Graph.
Measuring these key network metrics will allow you to better understand if something is wrong with your network.
Obkio will notify you of events like substantial packet loss between certain sites, or users experiencing high levels of jitter during VoIP calls, and more.
Metrics like VoIP Quality, throughput, and QoE are also important and are measured by Obkio.
Learn how to measure network performance with key network metrics like throughput, latency, packet loss, jitter, packet reordering and more!
Learn more
3. Perform a Network Assessment
You may have an idea that something is wrong with your network, but you may not know the extent of it.
Using Obkio, perform a network assessment to get an overall idea of the health of your network and identify areas of your network that are being affected by poor performance.
You can consult our article on How to Perform a Network Assessment for more information, but Obkio does it all for you:
Measure Network Metrics like packet loss, jitter, and latency, like we talked about in the previous section.
Perform Speed Tests to monitor network speed and validate if the bandwidth you need is readily available or if you’re experiencing high bandwidth usage.
Analyze Historical Data so you can analyze, compare, and troubleshoot performance from the past or intermittent network problems.
Learn how to perform a network assessment with Obkio Network Monitoring to optimize network performance for a new service deployment or migration.
Learn more
4. Identify Network Problems
You can now use all the data you’ve collected to actually identify network problems and collect the information you’ll use to troubleshoot.
With Obkio, you can create your own dashboard with a summary of your network metric measurements, the results of speed tests, and a detailed analysis of any network issues that may have been discovered.
You can identify:
- What the problem is
- Where the problem is located
- What caused the problem
- When the problem happened
- Who is responsible for the network segment
Obkio offers different features to help you with this process:
a. Traceroutes
Use Obkio’s scheduled and live Traceroutes to identify route, latency and packet loss between two sites and detect exactly where and when network problems happened. You can also easily view traceroute results with Obkio Vision Visual Traceroute tool.
b. Network Device Monitoring
Obkio’s Network Device Monitoring with SNMP monitoring feature measures the performance of key network equipment to identify if a problem is happening in your network or even in your service provider’s network.
c. Data Aggregation
To help you truly identify network problems, Obkio uses aggregation to show you the worst metric measurements to highlight network issues, where they happened and what is the cause.
For example, when measuring packet loss, the packet loss displayed over an aggregated period of 1h is the worst packet loss of all the small 1-min periods in the hour.
This is key because only showing you the average amount of packet loss on your network may hide intermittent network issues.
If you measure the average packet loss every 4 hours, the average may be good, but you can have 80% during a few minutes - which signals a big problem.
d. Network Alerts
To immediately detect intermittent problems when they happen, Obkio sends network alerts based on historical data. As soon as there’s a deviation in the historical data, and your network is experiencing any performance degradation, Obkio sends you an alert.
Download Obkio's free Complete Guide to Traceroutes to learn to identify network problems with the most popular network troubleshooting tool for IT Pros.
Download Now
5. Contact Your Service Provider
We always recommend reaching out to your Service Provider (MSP or ISP), to help you troubleshoot.
But this time, you won’t get stuck dealing with level 1 support telling you to just “reboot your modem.” With all the data you’ve collected using Obkio, you can hold your Service Provider accountable and give them all the information they need to troubleshoot.
For example, Obkio’s Live Traceroute feature allows you to share traceroute results using a link that is accessible by anyone - without having to log into the App.
This way, your MSPs network engineers can see the problem, change the traceroute options and validate that their changes are fixing the problem.
Learn how to use Obkio Vision’s Visual Traceroute tool to troubleshoot network problems with traceroutes both inside & outside your local network.
Learn more
Simplify Network Troubleshooting
To simplify the way you troubleshoot network issues in the future, you need to be proactive at identifying them.
Deploying a Network Monitoring & Troubleshooting tool like Obkio for continuous end-to-end network monitoring ensures you always have:
- Complete visibility over your network and network problems
- The data you need to troubleshoot
- The peace of mind knowing you can solve problems before your users even experience them
Set up in minutes with Obkio’s Getting Started Documentation!
