The Obkio Story: Building a Network Monitoring Solution

The increasing use of hosted services and SaaS applications has brought major changes to the architecture of networks and data flows. This is even more true with the recent arrival of SD-WAN on the market. These changes greatly increase our dependence on a high functioning network to help us ensure the maintenance of these critical applications.

The majority of traditional network monitoring solutions were designed to monitor network performance before these changes. With network requirements going further than ever before, that meant that these centralized solutions weren’t able to adapt well to this new decentralized reality and were no longer adequate.

That’s why Obkio’s team decided to tackle a solution that monitored end-to-end network performance from the end user perspective, and could fulfill the need within the industry for a solution that simplified Performance Monitoring.

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 specialized 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 all the years working in the industry, neither Jean-François or Pierre-Luc ever came across a tool that actually simplified network performance monitoring. They knew that for real, accurate network performance monitoring, the world needed a tool that provided end-to-end visibility of application and network performance, and did so from the end-user perspective.

The solutions on the market at the time rarely fulfilled all those needs, and were not simple to use or targeted towards the end-user experience. In addition, the existing solutions were largely targeted towards large enterprises and Service Providers.

Having always loved the simplicity of SaaS applications, Jean-François wanted to recreate that simplicity with a network performance monitoring solution. And therefore, Obkio was born as a Network Performance Monitoring tool that is:

• SaaS-based
• Easy to install and simple to use
• Made for small business as well as large enterprises
• Monitors network performance from the end-user perspective
• Provides a decentralized monitoring approach
• Monitors end-to-end network performance
• Offers usage-based billing
• Has no long-contract commitment
• And much more!

Since 2018, Obkio’s team has been dedicated to empowering IT professionals with a simple network performance monitoring solution that is easy to use, and identifies network performance issues immediately.