Network Optimization: How to Optimize Network Performance
In Summary
Optimizing your network performance is the key to ensuring that your network is performing as efficiently as possible. It helps provide optimal performance of your Internet, VPN, Firewall, VoIP and UC apps, and most importantly - your user experience. Keep reading to learn how to optimize network performance for continuous network optimization.
Table of Contents 
- What is Network Optimization?
- How to Optimize Network Performance
- Deploy Network Monitoring
- Measure Network Metrics
- Identify Network Problems
- Compare Network Performance
- Continuous Network Optimization
What is Network Optimization?
In short, Network Optimization refers to the tools, techniques, and best practices used to monitor and improve your network performance. Those techniques can include network monitoring, network troubleshooting, upgrading your network, etc.
An optimized network is one that should be able to sustain the demands of users, applications, and your business.
How to Optimize Network Performance
Although networks have different requirements depending on the size of the network, the scope of the business and the number of users and applications, the tips for optimizing network performance remain the same.
Network optimization is all about:
- Identifying network problems/ areas for improvement
- Improving your network performance with concrete changes
- Comparing performance before and after making changes
For example, migrating from an MPLS network to an SD-WAN network is a way to optimize your network performance by upgrading your network. But it doesn’t end there.
It’s important to monitor your SD-WAN migration to compare performance before and after the migration, to ensure your network performance is actually being optimized.
Here’s how to do that!
Learn how to monitor SD-WAN migrations with Network Monitoring for complete visibility over your SD-WAN service, before, after & during migrations.
Learn more
1. Deploy Network Monitoring
User complaints about network issues are a sure sign that your network may not be performing optimally. But you can’t let your users be your monitoring tool.
Obkio Network Monitoring SaaS solution monitors end-to-end network performance so you can monitor performance from your local network (LAN, VPN), as well as third-party networks (WAN, ISP, and Internet Peering).
Deploy Network Monitoring Agents in your key network locations (head office, remote offices, data centers) to monitor end-to-end network performance and:
- Measure core network metrics
- Continuously test your network for performance degradation
- Proactively identify network issues before they affect users
- Simulate user experience with synthetic traffic
- Collect data to help with network troubleshooting
- Compare network changes with historical data
Use Obkio’s free trial and Getting Started Tutorial to begin.
2. Measure Network Metrics
An important step in the network optimization process is to measure a series of key network metrics, which will help you identify any issues.
Once you’ve deployed Obkio Monitoring Agents in key network locations, they will continuously measure key network metrics like jitter, packet loss, latency, VoIP Quality, throughput and QoE, and display them on Obkio’s Network Response Time Graph.
Measuring network metrics allows you to proactively identify performance degradation in your network, which can be a sign of a larger network issue, or an intermittent network problem in hiding.
3. Identify Network Problems
Measuring network metrics in all your network locations will then allow you to identify:
- What the problem is
- Where the problem is located
- When the problem occurred
- Who is responsible for this network segment
- What actions to take
With this information, you then know where to direct your network optimization efforts, and what actions to take.
Whether you need to troubleshoot the network problems, contact your MSP or ISP, or upgrade your network.
Pro-Tip: Obkio allows you to set up automatic alerts for network problems, or when there’s a sign of network performance degradation so you know exactly when it’s time to start optimizing your network performance.
Learn how to troubleshoot network issues by identifying where, what, why network problems occur with Network Troubleshooting tools.
Learn more
4. Compare Network Performance
Comparing historical performance data is key to understanding if your network optimization changes actually have a positive effect on your network performance.
Without a tool like Obkio, you can’t truly understand if the changes you’re making to your network are actually beneficial unless you hear feedback from your users. That could take a lot of time and won’t allow you to be proactive if something is going wrong.
Obkio measures and collects historical network performance data, so you can analyze, compare, and troubleshoot performance from the past and compare performance before you optimize your network performance and after.
This way you can understand:
- The impact of your network optimization efforts
- If your network performance has improved
- If you need to continue optimizing your network performance
5. Continuous Network Optimization
No matter how efficiently your network is performing, networks don’t stay perfectly optimized forever.
Network requirements change as you add new applications and users, upgrade devices, and face increasing customer demands.
Network optimization needs to be continuous - so you need a dedicated team and solution to keep putting in the work to optimize your network.
Once you’ve deployed Obkio, keep it on as a permanent part of your team to keep an eye on your network, help you with network optimization and monitoring, and ensure you’re always following the steps from this list!
