Why Businesses Monitor Network Performance

With modern technology becoming more and more complex, the demand on networks is increasing. With this demand comes many opportunities for things to go wrong. Additionally, networks are often the backbone of businesses, and so when they don’t perform as they should be, your business may suffer as a result.

One of the best ways to avoid business-impacting issues is to proactively find and fix network issues before they wreak havoc on your business. Today, we’ll be giving you an overview of the top reasons why businesses monitor network performance to help them succeed. For a longer and more in-depth explanation, you can refer to 7 more reasons to monitor network performance.

What Is Network Performance Monitoring?

Firstly, let’s start off with the basics. Network performance refers to the analysis and review of collective network metrics to define the quality of services offered by the underlying network, primarily measured from an end-user perspective. More simply put, network performance refers to measures of service quality of a network, as seen by the customer or end-user.

Monitoring network performance refers to the process of collecting and measuring data about a variety of network performance metrics to continuously monitor the health of your network. It can help you pinpoint the location of a problem—or sometimes prove that the network is not at fault. It can also help you identify, locate, and solve issues before they start affecting users.

Unlike traditional monitoring solutions, performance monitoring lets you easily troubleshoot network slowdowns and not just hard failures Unlike traditional monitoring solutions, performance monitoring lets you easily troubleshoot network slowdowns and not just hard failures – which is essential for businesses.
which is essential for businesses.

Now let’s get into more reasons why businesses should monitor network performance.

1. Locate Network Problems

Businesses can’t afford network failures. Every minute that a business’ network is down, they’re losing money and time. Network monitoring avoids this catastrophe by helping businesses quickly and easily pinpoint the location and cause of a problem anywhere along their network.

Sometimes the network is at fault, but other times an issue can be due to other surrounding factors or applications. Network monitoring allows businesses to gather all information about a network problem to understand where it’s located, what caused it, and who is responsible for fixing it.

2. Identify Network Issues Before Users Do

One of the most important factors for any business is their users. Keeping users happy is the key to a successful business—which is why businesses need to ensure that users can access and use their services seamlessly.

A continuous network performance monitoring solution can help businesses identify, locate, and solve issues before they start affecting end-users to ensure that users always receive the best user experience possible. As soon as any network degradation occurs, a network performance monitoring solution will notify you with all the details, so you can get to fixing fast.

3. Troubleshoot Network Slowdowns

Network performance monitoring allows you to troubleshoot any network slowdowns or degradation and not just hard failures. Many traditional monitoring solutions only pinpoint issues the moment they’ve occurred, but at that point, it may be too late.

Any performance degradation can be a sign of an upcoming, much larger issue, which is why it’s important to find and fix slowdowns before your users start experiencing them too. If a business knows something is going wrong, they can get into action to fix a network problem, before it becomes a disaster.

4. Monitor Remotely

With more and more businesses going remote, keeping track of network performance has become more complex. That’s why businesses are turning to modern network monitoring solutions to monitor remote sites without requiring local IT resources.

A remote network monitoring solution helps monitor network performance in a decentralized manner, even across multiple remote locations. Deploy a performance monitoring solution throughout your network with strategically placed agents to give you visibility in even the most remote sites. You can be confident that the agents are constantly measuring and evaluating the performance of the network from a true user’s perspective.

5. Establish A Performance Baseline

Network monitoring provides businesses with network performance insight that they can use in numerous ways to optimize their networking infrastructure and their business operations.

Network performance monitoring allows businesses to collect historical data to establish a baseline network performance to easily compare ideal performance with below average. It also allows network administrators and service providers to look back in time to identify intermittent issues that may be hard to pinpoint, or may have happened in the past.

In Conclusion

There are many reasons why businesses should monitor network performance, from assuring the performance of the network, identifying and fixing issues, addressing the needs of remote workers in decentralized locations, and collecting network data to optimize business performance.

With the reliance that modern businesses have on technology, specifically network performance, no business can afford to be in the dark when it comes to their network infrastructure. So, during your next executive meeting, make sure to add a network performance monitoring solution to the discussion.

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Headline photo credit: Fabio Bracht

2nd photo credit: Thomas Jensen

3nd photo credit: Philipp Katzenberger