Shedding Light on Network Visibility: Don't Wait for End Users to Report Issues

Imagine driving a car at night without headlights. It's risky, right? Without them, you can't see where you're going, and you might crash. Well, the same goes for visibility in enterprise networks. If you can't see how they're performing, you might run into problems with important apps, slow Internet, and unhappy customers.

That's why having the right tools to see what's happening on your network is crucial. It's like turning on those headlights to make sure you're going in the right direction. Let’s head on!

Network visibility is all about understanding what's happening with the traffic and performance of your network. This means being able to keep track of, analyze, and make sense of the data moving through your network in real time. Network visibility looks at everything from how devices behave to how well applications are performing and how users are interacting with the network.

At its core, network visibility helps network administrators and IT professionals see exactly how their network is running. It gives them the ability to spot any potential issues, fix problems, and make improvements to how the network operates. By keeping an eye on network traffic and gathering important network metrics, organizations can take proactive steps to keep their network running smoothly and minimize any downtime.

Most network issues arise from a lack of visibility. When you can't see what's happening in your network, it's like being stuck in complete darkness. That's why having network visibility and monitoring are so important – they shine a light on your network's health and help you deal with issues smoothly.

In practical terms, achieving network visibility means using special tools and solutions that can monitor and analyze network performance. These tools could be things like network monitoring software, packet analyzers, or network probes. They help provide valuable insights into how the network behaves and performs, giving organizations the information they need to keep things running smoothly.

Around 75% of companies think they should make their network security better by improving visibility in their networks. This begins with knowing what network visibility is and how it can make things safer.

All networks are at risk of security threats, which are becoming more advanced. The goal is to quickly identify these dangers and take appropriate action. Network visibility helps organizations understand how traffic behaves on their networks, improving efficacy, performance, and security. As the volume and diversity of data carried by corporate networks increase, network visibility becomes even more critical.

1. Network Performance Troubleshooting:

A lack of network visibility can lead to performance bottlenecks, latency issues, and degraded user experience, impacting productivity and hindering business operations. 85% of the MTTR time that IT teams need is used to find out if there is a problem in the network.

When applications run slowly or stop working, real-time network diagnostics are needed to find the root cause. The majority of IT teams spend approximately 36% of their daily efforts on reactive troubleshooting.

With network visibility, organizations can monitor network performance metrics, identify areas of congestion or inefficiency, which helps to quickly pinpoint the problematic user, application, location, or device. This facilitates proactive troubleshooting and optimizes network resources to ensure smooth and efficient business operations.

2. Network Protection and Proactive Threat Detection:

Half of organizations don't have enough info to find potential threats. Nearly 40% of companies don't have comprehensive software to detect, alert, and deal with security breaches.

Network visibility plays a pivotal role in cybersecurity by enabling organizations to detect and respond to potential threats in real-time. Based on a survey by Vanson Bourne, about two-thirds, which is 67%, of organizations find that network blind spots are one of the main problems they deal with when safeguarding their data.

By monitoring network traffic and identifying suspicious behaviour or anomalies, organizations can proactively mitigate security risks, prevent data breaches, and safeguard sensitive information from unauthorized access. Being proactive in monitoring for potential threats or suspicious activities helps identify issues before they escalate. This is crucial for both on-premises and cloud environments to ensure network security.

3. Application Performance Monitoring and Reliability:

Ensuring that applications perform well not only today but also in the future is crucial for any organization. With the increasing complexity of modern networks due to multiple data centers, data encryption, advanced security and analytic tools, and international mobile users, maintaining the performance and reliability of network-centric applications is challenging.

Visibility plays a critical role in helping network admins understand how network issues affect data for each application. By monitoring network traffic and performance metrics, administrators can identify bottlenecks or issues that may impact application performance. They can then utilize configuration approaches such as Quality of Service (QoS), traffic policing, and shaping to prioritize vital data flows for mission-critical applications.

4. Proactive Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) Monitoring:

Network visibility allows organizations to continuously monitor the performance of various sites and platforms to ensure they meet their SLAs. By proactively monitoring network traffic and performance metrics, administrators can identify any deviations or issues that may impact SLA compliance. This proactive approach enables organizations to take corrective action promptly, preventing SLA breaches and ensuring that business-critical services remain available and reliable for users.

5. Supporting Business Continuity:

Network downtime can have far-reaching consequences, disrupting business operations, damaging reputation, and resulting in financial losses. Network visibility is essential for ensuring business continuity by enabling organizations to proactively monitor network health, anticipate potential issues, and implement measures to prevent downtime or minimize its impact.

Network visibility facilitates business growth by identifying data expansion patterns, preparing for future development, and supporting initiatives like cloud adoption and IoT.

6. Visibility for Supporting Remote Workers

As remote work becomes increasingly common, having visibility into network performance is essential. This is especially true for understanding the performance of Unified Communications (UC) apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, which are vital for remote workers. Additionally, monitoring VPN performance is crucial for ensuring secure access to company resources from different locations and devices.

Technologies like SD-WAN play a big role in addressing visibility challenges brought by remote work and cloud adoption. They enable organizations to maintain security and performance while supporting employees working from various locations.

Now that we fully grasp the significance of network visibility, it's time to take action. Here's how to get started on the right foot: Choose user-friendly network monitoring software that offers comprehensive visibility, proactive monitoring and alerting, as well as easy deployment.

And guess what? Obkio's Network Performance Monitoring Tool fits the bill perfectly!

Identifying network problems, gathering information on network performance, and enhancing end-user experience are all made possible with Obkio Network Monitoring, an easy-to-use SaaS solution. Users can monitor and troubleshoot end-to-end network and application performance.

Quickly pinpoint the root cause of intermittent VoIP, video, and application slowdowns with Obkio by using synthetic traffic and Network Monitoring Agents. Agents provide users with lots of useful metrics about how their network is doing, all shown in easy-to-read dashboards and graphs.

Gain 360-degree visibility into your network performance with Obkio NPM!

• 14-day free trial of all premium features
• Deploy in just 10 minutes
• Monitor performance in all key network locations
• Measure real-time network metrics
• Identify and troubleshoot live network problems

The process of monitoring and analyzing network traffic and performance from the source to the destination, taking into account all the parts and segments which make up the network path, is known as end-to-end network monitoring.

Understanding what parts of your network you need to keep an eye on is super important for making sure everything runs smoothly and securely. In simple words, network visibility means knowing everything that's happening in your network so you can look closely at these things:

• How well your network is performing
• The flow of data in your network
• Analyzing network metrics to track performance
• Monitor your applications and user experience
• Managing all the resources on your network

Here are some key things you should pay attention to:

1. Checking How Well Your Network Works:

Keep tabs on how fast your network is, how much data it's handling, and if there are any problems, like delays or lost data packets. This helps you spot any areas where your network might be slowing down or getting overloaded.

By tracking bandwidth utilization, latency, packet loss, and throughput, organizations can optimize network resources and ensure consistent and reliable performance across their network infrastructure.

2. Keeping Your Devices Healthy:

Make sure all your network devices, like routers, switches, and firewalls, are in good shape. Keep an eye on things like how much they're being used, if they're having any issues, or if they're vulnerable to security problems. According to Gartner, about 67% of the organizations they surveyed have had a security issue because of unmanaged network devices.

Monitoring device uptime, CPU utilization, and error rates enables organizations to detect hardware failures, configuration issues, and security vulnerabilities proactively.

3. Making Sure Users Are Happy:

Keep track of how users are experiencing your network. Are they able to use applications smoothly? Are there any issues with how quickly things load? Making sure users are happy helps keep your network running smoothly and keeps productivity high.

4. Checking Your Applications’ Performance:

Make sure your crucial applications are running smoothly. Keep an eye on how quickly they're responding and if any errors are popping up. This helps you fix any issues quickly and keeps your important services up and running.

By monitoring application performance metrics, such as response times and error rates, organizations can identify performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and optimize application delivery.

5. Spotting Security Threats:

Keep an eye out for any suspicious activity that could signal a security threat, like malware, phishing attacks, and unauthorized access attempts. By watching your network traffic and looking for unusual behaviour, you can stop potential threats before they cause any harm.

Achieving comprehensive network visibility requires more than just deploying monitoring tools, it also involves implementing best practices to effectively monitor, analyze, and optimize network performance. By following these best practices, organizations can maximize the value of their network visibility solutions and ensure seamless operations across their network infrastructure.

Before implementing network visibility solutions, organizations should define clear objectives and goals for their monitoring efforts. Whether it's optimizing performance, enhancing security, or ensuring compliance, having a clear understanding of the desired outcomes will guide the selection and deployment of monitoring tools and strategies.

Keep these crucial components of network monitoring as your targets:

• Complete LAN and WAN monitoring to ensure optimal performance.
• Visibility in real-time into possible security risks, latency, packet loss, error rates, device health, and network traffic.
• Enhancing the functionality of cloud apps and services, such as VoIP, UC, ERP, etc.
• Identifying and addressing network problems to enhance customer satisfaction.

First, start by looking at different ways to monitor your network and choose the one that fits your network's needs best. Once you've picked a method, find 3 to 5 companies that can provide the kind of monitoring your network needs.

Next, ask these companies for quotes, detailed proposals, and information about their prices. Think about important things like if their solution can grow with your network, how flexible it is, if it can work with other systems if you can customize it, and if it's easy to use and shows real-time data.

This way, you make sure the solution you choose not only works for your network now but can also keep up as your network grows and changes.

Here’s a handy article covering the 24 Best End-to-End Network Monitoring Tools for 360-degree Network Visibility.

Ready to make your operations smoother? Choose Obkio for active network performance monitoring!

If you're looking for the best way to keep your network running smoothly, the Obkio Network Performance Monitoring tool is the answer!

Obkio's Network Performance Monitoring tool offers a range of great features to help you see how your network is doing. It focuses on giving you detailed information about your network, finding any problems, and helping you fix them before they cause issues for your users. With Obkio, IT pros and network admins can keep an eye on their networks easily.

One cool thing about Obkio is that it actively monitors your network. By deploying Monitoring Agents in your network, Obkio checks how things like latency, packet loss, and data speed are doing in real-time. This lets you catch issues early, fix any bottlenecks, and make smart choices to improve your network.

Obkio's ability to provide end-to-end network visibility acts as a catalyst for improved performance, stronger security, and more revenue generation for businesses. Companies that achieve the optimal level of visibility will have advantages like:

• Reduced risk to security threats.
• Faster mean time to resolution (MTTR) of network issues.
• Continuous preparation for audits and network assessments.
• Enhanced usability and performance of the critical application.

Obkio also lets you keep an eye on every step your network takes, from start to finish. This helps you figure out exactly where problems are happening, so you can fix them faster. That’s what we call complete network visibility!

• 14-day free trial of all premium features
• Deploy in just 10 minutes
• Monitor performance in all key network locations
• Measure real-time network metrics
• Identify and troubleshoot live network problems

Monitoring best practices often means looking at how the network performs from the viewpoint of the people who use it every day. This approach lets administrators see things from the user's perspective, helping them find problems before users notice them.

Active or proactive monitoring, also called synthetic monitoring, is a way to check how well apps and the network are working. It works by creating pretend user activity inside the network to see how things are going. This helps admins find and fix any issues before they cause problems for users.

Read our comprehensive guide to Network Monitoring Best Practices to Elevate Your Admin Game!

When it comes to network monitoring, it's not just about knowing if your network is working or not. It's like comparing riding a drop tower to a Ferris wheel at an amusement park.

Traditional monitoring tools are like the drop tower. They give you a quick look at whether your network is up or down, but they don't show you much else about how well it's working.

But modern tools, like Obkio, are like riding the Ferris wheel. They give you a detailed and real-time view of how your network is doing, just like going on a fun ride.

To really understand your network's health, you need to look at more than just whether it's up or down. You need to know things like:

• Latency: How long it takes for data to move through your network.
• Jitter: How much the timing of data packets changes as they move through your network.
• Packet loss: When data packets don't make it to where they're supposed to go.
• Other 19 Network Metrics that play a crucial role in gaining visibility.

If your current tool doesn't show you these things, it's like trying to catch a train that's already left the station. If this sounds familiar, it might be time to think about switching to a different vendor and using better network monitoring practices.

A variety of dashboards and visualizations from Obkio are available with real-time network performance metrics. To assist customers in tracking and improving network performance, the platform provides a home page, agent details page, network session page, data center dynamic dashboard, branch dynamic dashboard, visual traceroutes, thresholds, and notifications.

Obkio makes sure you're always aware of the performance of your network with its user-friendly dashboards and customized notifications. Notifications can be configured to provide instant alerts when network metrics surpass predetermined thresholds, allowing you to proactively address possible network problems.

It's critical to optimize key Internet-driven activities in addition to basic Internet-related business demands, such as reducing latency in video conference calls. Businesses should also assess if the Internet service provider (ISP) they currently use can accommodate their changing needs in the present and the future.

It's crucial to notify the ISP about network issues by giving them comprehensive details about the problems, such as their sources, length, and features. By collecting this data with the aid of solutions such as Obkio's Dashboard, the ISP will be able to identify and fix the issue more quickly.

For assistance with troubleshooting, you should contact your service provider (ISP or MSP). However, level 1 support won't have to advise you to simply "reboot your modem." By using the data that you have gathered with Obkio, you are able to hold your service provider responsible and provide them with all the tools necessary for troubleshooting.

• To get in touch with your ISP for technical support, use the screenshots of your Obkio Vision dashboard, traceroutes, or monitoring sessions.

• Using a public URL, share the Live Traceroute results with your Internet provider.
• You can give your ISP a temporary Read-Only User status in your Obkio account so they can examine your data in greater detail.

In managing networks, people often mix up the terms "network observability" and "network visibility." But they're actually different concepts that work together to monitor and manage networks. It's important to understand these differences for organizations to manage their networks well.

Network Visibility:

Network visibility means keeping an eye on network traffic and performance. It's about collecting data from different devices and apps to understand how the network is working. This helps IT teams see things like how much data is being used, how fast it's moving, and if there are any problems like delays or lost data. With network visibility tools, teams can spot issues and fix them quickly.

Network Observability:

Network observability is about understanding what's going on inside the network based on what we see happening outside. It goes beyond just looking at traffic and focuses on understanding how different parts of the network interact with each other. Using advanced technology like analytics and machine learning, network observability helps predict issues before they happen and understand complex patterns in network infrastructure.

Key Differences:

1. Focus:

• Network visibility looks at metrics like traffic volume, jitter and latency.
• Network observability digs deeper into internal network behaviour and interactions.

2. Granularity:

• Network visibility gives detailed insights into specific metrics in real time.
• Network observability provides a more in-depth view of historical data within the network.

3. Predictive Capabilities:

• Network visibility helps proactively monitor and troubleshoot network issues.
• Network observability uses analytics to predict future network behaviour and take preemptive actions to network problems.

What is Network Observability (vs. Network Monitoring)?

Discover the power of network observability and monitoring. Learn how to implement them effectively and leverage Obkio's Network Monitoring tool for success.

Learn more

In today's world, where cloud computing, remote work, and distributed applications are widespread, network setups have become more complicated and spread out. This complexity poses unique challenges for achieving complete network visibility, requiring specific approaches and solutions.

Understanding the significance of network visibility in distributed networks is crucial for organizations aiming to efficiently manage and safeguard their network infrastructure across various locations and setups.

Distributed networks involve a mix of interconnected parts, including in-house systems, cloud resources, remote offices, and mobile gadgets. Handling and keeping track of these diverse environments bring forth several hurdles, such as:

• Increased Complexity: With multiple interconnected parts spread across different places, understanding the overall network performance and behaviour becomes tough.
• Limited Control: Organizations often lack control over network setups, particularly in cloud-based or third-party environments, leading to visibility gaps and security concerns.
• Data Compliance: Compliance rules and data regulations vary across regions, making network monitoring and data management more complex.
• Dynamic Workloads: Applications and workloads are dynamically deployed and scaled across various environments, making it tricky to monitor network traffic and performance in real-time.

Imagine trying to manage a big game of tag spread out across many playgrounds. Network visibility in distributed networks is like having clear maps and cameras everywhere so you can see where everyone is and what they're doing. It's crucial because without this visibility, it's like playing tag blindfolded – you can't keep track of things or spot problems quickly.

So, how can you achieve that?

• Deploy Monitoring Tools: Use network monitoring tools that can provide comprehensive visibility into your network traffic, including bandwidth utilization, packet loss, latency, and application performance metrics.

• Utilize Synthetic Monitoring: Implement synthetic monitoring tools to simulate user interactions with applications and services. This helps in monitoring application performance, uptime, and user experience from different locations.

• Implement Flow Monitoring: Use flow monitoring protocols like NetFlow, sFlow, or IPFIX to collect and analyze flow data from network devices. Flow monitoring provides insights into traffic patterns, application usage, and network behavior.

• Centralize Logging and Monitoring: Centralize logging and monitoring data from distributed network devices and systems into a unified platform. This allows for easier analysis, correlation of events, and real-time monitoring of network performance and security events.

• Segmentation and Micro-Segmentation: Implement network segmentation and micro-segmentation strategies to logically separate different parts of your network. This helps in controlling and monitoring traffic flows between segments, enhancing security, and isolating potential threats.

How to Monitor Distributed Networks: The Essential Guide

Learn how to monitor distributed networks like SD-WAN using Obkio’s distributed Network Performance Monitoring tool vs. traditional centralized solutions.

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In conclusion, it's clear that limited visibility into network performance can lead to a myriad of issues, with nearly 40% of network problems being reported by end users. Let's face it - no one wants to hear about problems from their customers. It's much better to catch and fix issues before they affect end users. That's where network monitoring tools like Obkio come in. By monitoring your network with Obkio, you can experience the benefits of complete network visibility firsthand.

Don't wait until your customers start complaining - take control of your network's performance today with Obkio.

• 14-day free trial of all premium features
• Deploy in just 10 minutes
• Monitor performance in all key network locations
• Measure real-time network metrics
• Identify and troubleshoot live network problems