Top 3 Network Monitoring Use Cases for MSPs

You may have heard IT professionals go on about the importance of monitoring your network performance and how a network performance monitoring software can help you pinpoint the cause of problems like dropped calls, slow downs, or connection losses. The easiest way to get the point across is to understand the specific situations in which the solution will be used.

So today, we’re running you through 3 use cases for network performance monitoring, specifically for service providers (MSPs).

In today's tech world, the term network monitoring is widespread throughout the IT and network industry. Network monitoring is the process of continuously measuring and analyzing network metrics to gather information to determine, in real time, whether a network is running optimally. More specifically, it allows you to define the quality of services offered by the underlying network, primarily measured from an end-user perspective.

Network Monitoring generally includes monitoring all networking components like routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and VMs to continuously maintain and optimize their availability. One important aspect of network monitoring is that it should be proactive. Proactively pinpointing network issues and bottlenecks helps you identify network problems before they affect end-users. Efficient proactive network monitoring can help you identify network slowdowns and not just failures, to prevent network problems before they happen.

For many companies, their network is a foundation atop which their house is built. If their foundation is crumbling, the whole house falls apart.

Think of your business like a revenue property, and you’re the landlord. Slow downs or dropped connections are like cracks in your foundation. As the cracks accumulate, the strength of your foundation is jeopardized. You’ll then be forced to spend a ridiculous amount of money and time fixing the foundation because you didn’t fix the cracks as they appeared, and you’ll also run the risk of losing your tenants, or for businesses, clients.

With tools such as networking monitoring software (and network performance monitoring), IT specialists and network engineers can proactively

• Identify network issues
• Troubleshoot network degradation,
• Optimize network performance, and more.

Now, let’s look at some concrete examples of when a network performance monitoring solution is your best bet at saving the very foundation of your business.

Managed Service Providers , or MSPs, remotely manages a customer's IT infrastructure and/or end-user systems, typically on a proactive basis and under a subscription model. They can deliver services, such as network, application, infrastructure and security, in their MSP’s data center (hosting), or in a third-party data center.

MSPs are responsible for managing a multitude of customer services and equipment, but managing network performance is not always the main strength of many IT administrators. This is why it’s important for MSPs to monitor network performance to have complete visibility of the performance of their customers’ LAN and WAN network.

Network Monitoring for MSPs allows MSPs to:

• Perform a network assessment before deploying new services for customers.
• Proactively monitor clients’ network performanc up to the service provider infrastructure.
• Help clients find and fix network problems in minutes.
• Increase network performance insight to make optimization suggestions.

In this article, we’ll be covering 3 top networking monitoring use cases for services providers (MSPs).

Here’s a quick overview of each network monitoring use case before we delve into each with more detail.

• Network Assessment

  • Used during or after the sales process
  • Used to qualify the network before deployment of a monitoring solution
  • Identifies issues before a migration (like an SD-WAN migration for example)

• Network Troubleshooting

  • Customer/ user complains about a performance performance issue
  • End-to-end visibility is required to pinpoint the source of an issue
  • Used as a network diagnostic tool

• Continuous Network Monitoring

  • Becomes a permanent installation for continuous network monitoring
  • Proactively discover performance issues and be alerted instantly
  • Find and fix issues before they affect end-users

The most important thing to remember is that you can’t fix what you can’t measure!

Now let’s get to the network monitoring use cases.

The first network monitoring use case is a network assessment, which is

An in-depth analysis of your current network infrastructure to gather data about your network’s health, including current issues, and any signs of network degradation.

You’re deploying a new service that relies on network connectivity to function.

For example, you have a customer migrating from on-premise VoIP to a hosted VoIP. A network connection, be it either a private connection or internet connection, is required to use the new service.

You need to make sure the network connection is strong and reliable before the service is deployed with network connection monitoring. If there’s an issue with the network quality after the deployment of the new service, your customer will be frustrated and you’ll be scrambling to solve an issue that you could have identified earlier.

You need to act sooner than later. During your sales process or before the service deployment, perform a network assessment to validate that the end-to-end network performance, right from the customer to the service provider infrastructure, is strong and reliable enough to sustain the new service.

Testing the network performance before service deployment will help you identify issues with the LAN, WAN, firewalls or internet access.

Mitigate any post-deployment risk by quickly finding and fixing issues before the new service is deployed and the migration is completed.

Avoid failures, panic and client frustration by delivering a successful deployment the first time. You’re guaranteed to start your business relationship on the right foot by starting it with success!

Network Assessment for A Successful IT Migration or Deployment

Learn about the importance of performing a network assessment before a network migration or the deployment of a new service to ensure a successful migration.

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The second network monitoring use case is probably the most commonly known, which is network troubleshooting. It is the use case that many people turn to in emergency situations.

Network Troubleshooting refers to the combined measures and processes used to identify, locate, and resolve network problems located anywhere along a network, from WAN to LAN.

Your end-users start reporting intermittent service performance and slowness issues. You’re a service provider (or MSP) that relies on a third-party network to deliver the service that you’re selling to your customers. Everything looks fine from your end, but you’re unable to confirm that everything is running smoothly between your customer and their infrastructure, because it’s being hosted by a third-party.

Bottom line is that your customer is experiencing problems and is unsatisfied, so you need to quickly figure out what is going wrong so you can support your customer.

Deploy a monitoring solution, specifically a device network monitoring solution, that measures end-to-end network performance to identify issues whether they are located within the Customer LAN, Firewalls, or internet access.

Get a 360-degree view of network and application connections to see issues you never would have had visibility of before.

Measuring network performance using a software that continuously measures technical metrics allows you to find issues, even before the end-user experiences them.

Quickly identify if the problem is related to the network, where it is and when it occurs. You can then confirm if you, the service provider, need to continue troubleshooting and manage your customer’s expectations.

How to Troubleshoot Network Issues: Unleash Your Inner IT Hero

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The third network monitoring use case is the most beneficial because it allows you to be proactive when it comes to identifying network issues and optimizing network performance.

Continuous network monitoring is the process of continuously monitoring network performance to provide real-time data on the overall health of IT infrastructure.

Service providers (MSPs) aren’t really able to troubleshoot past intermittent network issues if the issues disappear by the time the customer reports them.

The truth is that it's a bad user experience for customers to report issues to their service providers, and their service providers have no clue that something is wrong. You want to ensure that an issue is resolved before it ever reaches the user.

Deploy a continuous network monitoring solution to proactively monitor and identify network issues affecting customer experience, even before the user realizes there’s an issue.

Proactively fix issues, even before they affect customers.

Not only will this avoid a whole lot of customer frustration, but it’ll also create value for customers, knowing that their service provider is constantly looking out for them.

Service Providers can also use Obkio for SLA Monitoring to ensure that their customers are receiving the level of service promised in the Service-Level Agreement.

In addition, the overall service performance can differentiate one service provider from the competition. Turn a negative event into a good customer experience by taking care of the customer issues quickly and efficiently.

Network Optimization Strategies: How to Optimize Network Performance

Learn to use network optimization and monitoring to optimize network performance, improve your end-user experience, and compare performance from the past.

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There you have the 3 top network monitoring use cases for using a network monitoring software, especially if you’re a service provider (MSP)!

Essentially, you want to make sure you’re always:

• Monitoring
• Testing
• Fixing

Networks are often the backbone of businesses, so when they don’t perform to the best of their capabilities, business may suffer as a result. MSPs, if their clients’ network are experiencing issues, MSPs will be the first to hear that complaints and will need to hustle to solve the problems, and keep the clients satisfied.

One of the best ways to avoid business-impacting issues is to see them coming and fix them before they have a chance to wreak havoc on your business.

You can also try our solution for yourself and make sure your network, or your client’s network, is operating at the highest level possible.

Get started with Obkio's Free Trial!