The Obkio Story: Building a Network Observability & Diagnostics Solution

In 2016, before Obkio existed, we ran a market audit. We interviewed banks, manufacturing companies, and service providers, and asked them one simple question:

Why aren't you using a Network Performance Monitoring solution?

The answer was unanimous: the tools were too complex, and nobody had the internal resources to run them full-time.

If that was true for enterprises with dedicated networking staff, it was even more true for smaller businesses with generalist IT teams. Nobody had a level 3 network engineer on standby.

That's the gap Obkio was built to fill.

We didn't want to build another monitoring tool. We wanted to build the simplest one: a tool that gave IT teams real data about what's actually happening on their network, not just whether it was up or down. And beyond monitoring, we wanted it to help diagnose issues automatically, without requiring deep networking expertise to interpret the results.

Obkio was founded by Founder and CEO in 2018, Jean-François Lévesque. Jean-François studied Computer Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal with a specialization in networking and telecommunications. For over 10 years, he was the co-founder and CTO at Fibrenoire, a telecommunication company specializing in fibre optic connectivity for enterprises with services such as Private MPLS Networks, VoIP and Cloud connectivity.

Jean-François then partnered up with friend and former Fibrenoire colleague, Pierre-Luc Charbonneau. Pierre-Luc has 20 years of experience in Computer Networks and worked as the director of presales engineering and special projects at Fibrenoire, where he designed state-of-the-art connectivity solutions for medium and large enterprises. Pierre-Luc has encountered many networks, for many clients, and works very closely with the client to translate their needs and network problems into solutions with technical teams.

In 2023, Francis Gingras assumed the role of CEO, bringing with him a wealth of experience from a successful 30-year career in various tech companies. In his most recent position at Serti, a software provider for car dealerships, he was the chief architect and driving force behind the company’s transformation from a traditional project and software license business to a cutting-edge SaaS-based model.

Pierre-Luc Charbonneau on the left and Francis Gingras on the right.

3 years later, Pierre-Luc Charbonneau has stepped into the CEO role, with Francis continuing as President and Chairman of the Board to guide financial strategy and partnerships.

For Pierre-Luc, this isn't a title change; it's the natural next step in a journey that started in 2018. Eight years of building, one feature and one data source at a time, have led to this moment: a platform pivot toward true network observability, and the upcoming launch of Obkio Insight. His focus going forward is product vision, platform scalability, and Obkio's international expansion.

Obkio launched in 2018. From day one, the vision was always the same: automate network performance monitoring. But to get there, we had to build the foundation first.

• Network Performance Monitoring was our starting point. Unlike most tools that only reported network status, Obkio generated and measured synthetic traffic to monitor actual network health, identifying not just whether a problem existed, but where it was happening.
• SNMP Device Monitoring came next. By correlating device data with synthetic traffic, we could see in real time how a bandwidth spike or CPU issue on a router was affecting traffic throughput. Monitoring and device data, side by side.
• Then came traceroutes: first on a 10-minute interval, then triggered every 2 minutes. But it still wasn't enough. We needed real-time visibility. That led to Obkio Vision, our first Visual Traceroute tool: traceroutes rebuilt from the ground up to be intuitive, visual, and actually useful for troubleshooting across the Internet.
• We then added Application Performance Monitoring to identify issues between users and the services they depend on: monitoring DNS, HTTP, and the applications people use every day. We added MOS score interpretation to quantify how voice quality is affected by packet loss, latency, and jitter.
• And we built a Speed Test Tool with scheduling, history, and visual reports, because even though speed isn't the best indicator of network health, we know IT teams need it to challenge ISP SLAs.

Each feature was built with a specific purpose: to add another source of data that could eventually be correlated to diagnose issues automatically.

Every feature above runs on Obkio's Monitoring Agent, the core of the platform. As we expanded what the Agent needed to do, we hit the limits of the original architecture.

So we re-engineered it from scratch.

Agent V.2 was rewritten in GoLang with multi-threading, allowing it to run tests from multiple data points in parallel without added load or hardware requirements. It took four years to build. It's available to all users today, and it's what makes everything that comes next possible.

Obkio Insight is our automatic network diagnostics engine. It's what we were set to build, and 8 years later, it's here.

The problem it solves is real: most IT teams aren't network specialists. When an alert fires, they know something is wrong, but they don't know where to start. Troubleshooting is time-consuming, intimidating, and constantly deprioritized in favour of other work.

Insight changes that.

When a monitoring session detects a network issue (packet loss, for example), Insight automatically correlates data across every layer of Obkio's platform. It checks whether the Monitoring Agent has the resources to run its tests (to rule out false positives). It analyzes CPU, memory, and bandwidth data from network devices to identify congestion. It cross-references traceroute data from the same period to pinpoint affected IP addresses. It checks application performance data to rule out app-layer issues.

The result: instead of just sending an alert that says "packet loss detected," Insight sends an alert that says "here's the probable cause", with a single-click path to an automatically generated dashboard showing all relevant data from the time of the event, with the root cause highlighted.

Insight doesn't replace IT pros. It gives them a head start, and gives non-specialists the ability to pinpoint a problem, identify who's responsible for fixing it, and open a support ticket with proof.

For MSPs, Insight adds another dimension: it ends the blame game. When a client says "your network is broken" and the problem is on the ISP side, Insight shows exactly where the issue is and who owns it.

Insight's first release focuses on Internet-based use cases. From here, we're expanding it to cover more network architectures: VPN, SD-WAN, Microsoft Teams, and other business-critical applications.

The model is straightforward: monitor synthetic traffic through Teams, detect a performance issue, and trigger an automatic diagnosis. Then replace Teams with any other application on the list; the process is the same.

We'll continue adding use cases based on what our customers need most.

Obkio today is a Network Observability & Diagnostics platform, not just a monitoring tool. It's used by IT teams and network engineers in over 40 countries, across enterprises, small businesses, and MSPs.

The complexity of what we measure hasn't changed. The goal of keeping it simple to use hasn't changed either.

We're still playing the same infinite game: make it easier to use, and cover more of the problems IT teams actually face.