Who Uses A Network Performance Monitor

Network performance monitoring has become a standard practice for modern businesses. With the shift towards large cloud-based applications, and hosted services, businesses rely on optimal network performance to sustain some of their key applications. Because of that, tools like network performance monitoring software have piqued the interest of users even outside of the IT team.

Keep reading to learn about who uses a network performance monitor and how it can help you optimize network performance, even if you aren’t an IT pro.

Whether you’re a team of one or a team of twenty, a network performance monitor is a key tool to help you ensure the proper functioning of key network components and applications.

While more traditional network monitoring tools were tailored solely towards IT professionals and network engineers, the overachieving importance of network performance has led to an innovation in the usability and simplicity of modern network monitoring solutions.

Whether you’re an IT professional, IT director, executive, or an everyday user, using and understanding network performance monitoring can help you be more proactive and more productive.

Let’s get into how different users use a network performance monitor.

A Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is generally a software solution that monitors network performance between a head office, remote sites, data centers, clouds and applications in real-time.

It helps a Network Administrator locate and troubleshoot network problems like delay, data loss and network availability of any network link across on-premises networks.

A network performance monitor like Obkio’s network performance monitoring solution consists of deploying physical or software network monitoring Agents at strategic locations in a company's offices or network destinations to continuously measure network performance, collect data, and notify users of network issues or degradation.

The software continuously tests and measures different operating parameters based on network metrics, such as:

• Latency
• Jitter
• Packet Loss
• Quality of Service and customer experience via the QoE (Quality of Experience)
• Network Speed
• And more

Now let’s get into who can benefit from this tool!

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IT directors can be under a lot of pressure managing their team of IT specialists, as well as IT problems and complaints from other employees and clients of an organization.

With so many unexpected responsibilities that can come up at any time, IT directors need to find a way to continuously improve the IT processes that are in place to increase productivity, decrease the time it takes to solve IT problems, and be prepared for whenever new problems may arise.

How can they do this? Well, by having tools that they can use to support them in their everyday tasks to maintain a high level of operational efficiency.

• Improve the current IT processes put in place.
• Ensure the company’s network is running at the highest level possible.
• Supply their team with the tools/ support / coaching they need to succeed in their positions.
• Support all business departments in their operations.

A network performance monitoring solutions allows IT directors and their teams to essentially do 80% of the work, with 10% of the effort.

A network performance monitor allows IT directors to benefit from all three of the most common network monitoring use cases.

• Network Assessment: For IT directors looking to deploy a new service for their business or migrate to a new service, like hosted VoIP, you can perform a network assessment to validate that the end-to-end network performance is strong and reliable enough to sustain the new service.

• Network Troubleshooting: When users start experiencing network problems, the IT director is likely one of the first people to hear the complaints and take on the responsibility of fixing them. Network troubleshooting using a network performance monitor allows IT directors to get a 360-degree view of network and application performance to identify network performance issues they never would have had visibility of before.

• Continuous Network Monitoring: IT directors have a lot of their plate. Which means that there are times when users may complain about intermittent network issues, and by the time you’ve had a chance to look at them, the issues have disappeared. Deploying a continuous network monitoring solution can help to proactively monitor and identify network issues affecting user experience, even before they realize there’s an issue at all.

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IT Specialists are an integral part of any business. I’m sure many of us can think back to all the times we’ve run to an IT specialist because our computer, internet, or VPN connection wasn’t working.

IT Specialists are tasked with the responsibility of handling all technology related resources within a business and making sure everyone has the technical resources they need.

A high functioning network is extremely important to a business, and to IT specialists. As soon as network performance begins to degrade, IT knows they have a problem. With so many other tasks on their plate, no IT Specialist wants to spend a whole day trying to find the source of network problems. They need to automate and simplify the troubleshooting process to avoid leaving their colleagues without a proper network connection.

• Ensure the proper functioning of IT resources & network performance for users
• Solve immediate network problems
• Simplify the troubleshooting process for network problems
• Save time on the job by automating manual work
• Collect performance data to present to executives and track network performance

When users start complaining about slow application performance and choppy video quality, everyone is quick to point the finger at the network. Most often, it’s then up to the IT Specialist (or network administrator) to identify if there is a network problem, and if so, what it is.

Just like with IT directors, IT specialists can benefit from all these of the network monitoring use cases:

• Network Assessment
• Network Troubleshooting
• Continuous Network Monitoring

A Network performance monitor simplifies this process by immediately alerting you as soon as a network problem is detected. Unlike a network fault monitoring solution, which just tells you that there is a problem, a solution (like Obkio) provides information on what the problem is, when the problem occurred, and where it is located. That means that IT pros can take this data and immediately find a solution.

It doesn’t stop there. A network performance monitor will continuously monitor network performance to proactively detect issues, even before end-users do.

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Most people depend on service providers to provide critical services and solutions such as telecommunications, VoIP, internet, storage, payment services, and more. Whether you’re a client or a service provider yourself, you may know that there’s generally a lot of back and forth between clients and services providers when something goes wrong.

When internet connection slows, or VoIP calls start lagging, so begins the game of ping pong between service providers and clients as they try to figure out if the issue is on their end, or on their clients’ end.

What if service providers could provide their clients with a solution to help them monitor their network performance so easily pinpoint where these issues come from? In addition,service providers are always on the lookout for new and innovative solutions that they can resell to their existing or future clients, to create an extra revenue stream for their business.

• Create a new revenue stream for their business by re-selling innovative solutions.
• Provide their clients with the best user-experience possible.
• Quickly find and fix network problem that may hinder the services they provide.
• Continue to provide their client base with support and new services.

When their users begin complaining about performance issues, service providers need to hurry to figure out if the problem is on their end. A lot of the time, this creates a lot of back and forth between service providers and clients, which can lead to a lot of wasted time, and a lot of frustration.

Network performance monitoring takes out all of the guesswork.

With a network performance monitoring software like Obkio at their disposal, service providers can provide their clients with a solution that continuously monitors their network performance and notifies them whenever a problem arises anywhere along their network. With information about what the problem is, and when and where it began, service providers can easily identify who is responsible for fixing the issue.

Service providers can also use Obkio for [SLA Monitoring] to ensure they're upholding the promose made to their customers.

Pro-Tip: With Obkio’s Public Monitoring Agents, service providers get even more visibility. These type of Monitoring Agents are monitoring agents which are operated by Obkio, but hosted by major cloud providers or third-party service providers. By hosting a Public Agent, service providers gain full visibility into clients’ network performance by allowing them to monitor network performance up to the Service Provider infrastructure.

That means that they can easily troubleshoot clients’ network problems with access to the same performance metrics between their Monitoring Agents and their customers’ agents.

Finally, providing a network performance monitoring solution creates a new stream of revenue for service providers who can re-sell the solutions to their clients, for more revenue. Clients are happy for the extra support, and service providers can expand their business with new and innovative services.

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We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, when it comes to network performance, the end-user is the most important metric. After all, good network performance is based on a network’s ability to meet the user’s expectations.

The everyday user can be anyone, whether from a team of one or a team of twenty, and could be from any department. Most everyday users rely on strong network performance to use the internet, connect to their VPN, jump on client calls, and use cloud-based applications like an ERP (Netsuite, Microsoft Dynamics or SAP performance issues) or CRM (Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce performance).

They’re generally the first ones to experience any sort of network degradation, as network issues can drastically hinder their ability to be productive and perform everyday tasks. - which is why everyday users generally first turn to network performance monitoring when they are experiencing a network problem.

• Ensure their network is performing as expected
• Optimize network performance to be as proactive as possible
• Quickly locate and fix network problems

While most businesses have an IT specialist or network engineer in charge of managing network performance, network performance affects most users. That’s why a network performance monitor like Obkio is simple and easy enough for anyone to use.

Everyday users can get a quick glimpse of their current network status from the dashboard to ensure there are no interrupts while they work. If a network problem emerges, everyday users can leverage a network performance monitor to gather information about the cause and source of a network problem, and bring the data to the department responsible for fixing the issue.

Sometimes, users may have a hard time explaining complaints like laggy video calls, or slow download times to their technical team. But with a network performance monitor, they don’t have to. The software does the assessment and troubleshooting for you, so users can get back to work as fast as possible.

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Being in a position overlooking significant parts of a business, such as product or operations, it’s important to make sure everything is running smoothly. Operational problems, customer complaints, and other problems of that nature are your worst enemy.

The less you hear about something, the happier you are.

• Increase or ensure the quality of service for the business’ customers.
• Equip the business with tools to increase efficiency and productivity.
• Ensure the network is running at optimal performance to make the company look reliable to clients.

A Network Performance Monitor provides an easy solution to help businesses provide their clients, and employees, with the best possible end-user experience. If your network cannot sustain your business’ requirements, your business will suffer - it’s that simple.

With continuous monitoring, executives can ensure that their employees have the resources they need to work efficiently and productively, without being bogged down by network problems like slow Internet performance, Internet connectivity issues, and choppy VoIP Quality.

When it comes to clients, network performance monitoring allows businesses to provide their clients with the best end-user experience, guaranteed. Not only will this make customers happy, but it will make your business appear reliable to future clients and investors.

Network performance affects the majority of users in modern businesses, which is why it’s important for your business to get an end-to-end view of your network infrastructure at all times.

Network problems affect everyone from those in charge of IT and network updates, all the way to users in departments like sales and accounting.

While many traditional network performance monitors may be overly complicated and tailored towards the IT professional, modern solutions understand the needs to adapt to all users.

In summary, network performance monitoring solutions can:

• Provide end-users with the best user experience
• Identify network problems to ensure business practices run smoothly
• Address and solve user complaints
• Make the business appear reliable to customers and investors

Obkio is a simple network performance monitoring software that allows users to continuously monitor the health of their network and core business applications to improve the end-user experience. Easily identify the causes of intermittent VoIP, video, and applications slowdown in seconds right from the Obkio dashboard to get end-to-end visibility of your complete network infrastructure.