Top 11 Benefits of Network Performance Monitoring Solutions

What is Network Management Tools?

Network management is the practice of monitoring and controlling a network using multiple tools. It manages the network for fault and performance to cater to business requirements.

Network management can be complex, hence administrators require robust solutions to monitor network performances. 

Key Aspects of Network Management Solutions:

• Fault Identification:

Network management solutions offer real-time visibility and analytics. It helps collect and produce insights based on the assessments to identify issues and faults.

Signal coverage, device connections, and device locations play a major role in fault identification. It helps troubleshoot faults manually or automatically to restore the performance management to an original or a more efficient condition.

• Network Agility:

Network management solutions enable businesses to adapt, change and evolve. It calculates the load handled by a network and predicts future demands.

Network management solutions offer agility by keeping resources in reserve for future requirements. 

• Compliance and Reporting:

Compliance plays a very important role in organizations. It needs to be addressed adequately.

Network management solutions perform tasks efficiently to accomplish compliance and provide in-depth reporting capabilities.

Importance of Network Monitoring: Why Do Businesses Need Network Management Tools?

Selecting the right network management tool simplifies continuous IT tasks and responsibilities. A company’s network must always be prepared and built for current and future challenges.

Network management tools identify bandwidth utilization, uptime, availability, and response time of network devices. The tools provide detailed information, analysis, and reports that help in troubleshooting.

Network monitoring solutions handle performance monitoring to eliminate physical system administrators and manual checks. This process helps save time and cost and addresses the issues effectively.

Network management solutions generate reports from network monitoring to identify patterns and trends in systems performance. This helps optimize the performance of a network and improves availability.

The importance of network monitoring can be seen when an organization needs to track trends. It helps benchmark performances, availability of data, and a proactive approach that helps businesses stay informed.

Types of Network Monitoring Tools:

Now that we have established the importance of having network monitoring solutions, let’s consider the types of solutions for efficient performance.

• SNMP-Based Network Monitoring Tools:

The standard-based SNMP protocol is available in multiple monitoring tools. It associates with network hardware and surveys real-time statuses and usage of resources. 

SNMP-based network monitoring tools generate alerts and notify the problems to administrators. It includes open source solutions offered by Nagios and commercial ones offered by HP, SolarWinds, and IBM.

• Flow-Based Network Performance Monitoring Tools:

Flow-based monitoring tools process and capture real user data are known as traffic flow. It provides statistics about the protocols and users consuming a link capacity.

Traffic flows are recorded by an inline device, a software agent, or network elements that affect the user traffic. It also tracks specific sequences and identifies the issues between the clients and servers. 

Once the flow is recorded, it is sent to the central collector for storage and processing. It helps analyze traffic by copying traffic flows for configuration and generating statistics on user traffic.

Solutions like NTOP, WireShark, Riverbed, and NetScout are available to help with network performance monitoring.

• Active Network Monitoring:

Active Network Monitoring is achieved by injecting real packets into the network. It assesses end-to-end reachability, round-trip-time, bandwidth, link utilization, etc.

It tests applications from the user’s perspective by executing real transactions. It then measures the performance for execution and response time.

The method helps examine networks and applications. It does not require monitoring of individual components or presuming their availability and performance.

It includes open source tools like SmokePing and Iperf as well as commercial solutions like NetBeez.

What are the Benefits of Network Performance Monitoring Solutions?

Here are the top benefits of Network Performance Monitoring Solutions:

Measuring Standard Performance

Network Performance Monitoring Solutions provide complete visibility of the network. It helps measure performances regularly and identify any discrepancies in the performance standard.

It helps to pre-emptively discover anomalies to empower network monitoring professionals. It assists in recognizing and rectifying potential errors in the network before they create critical issues.

Effectively Allocating Resources

Networks often deal with heavy workloads and projects. The IT teams are also working with a limited time, staff, and budget for multiple tasks.

Hence, a network performance monitoring solution is required to effectively allocate resources. It helps comprehend the source of issues and proactively work towards optimizing the available resources resulting in lesser IT outages.

Adapting to the IT Environment Changes

Businesses and their IT requirements are continually changing to cater to business requirements. Businesses also need to have a hold of the ongoing trends as they impact the IT management and environment.

An effective network performance monitoring solution provides IT teams with detailed information on the connected devices. It also enables the analysis of long-term trends, optimizes the use of available assets, and reduces expenses.

Identifying Security Threats

Organizations often face challenges in preventing cybercrime. Cyber-attacks have become more sophisticated and complicated to trace. 

This is where network performance monitoring solutions play an important role. It works toward protecting the data and systems from attacks.

It protects the network and maintains security standards on all individual workloads.

Deploy New Technologies and System Upgrades

Businesses use new technologies and services to serve their business requirements. With financial investments on these projects, it is important to manage the network environment.

Hence, network performance monitoring solutions help scale the current technology to meet business standards. It helps gain insights into the new equipment and its performance over time.

It allows the teams to determine the capability of the network to handle new technology. It also reduces risks by monitoring performances and calculating ROI based on pre and post-performance metrics.

Complete Network Visibility

Businesses need complete visibility on the network to determine its performance. Network performance monitoring solutions help observe the traffic, monitor devices and assess performance metrics.

Network performance monitoring solutions provide detailed information on the monitoring capabilities of the network. With network visibilities problems that affect the network performance can be easily resolved.

Predict, Resolve and Prevent Network Downtime

A robust network performance monitoring solution plays a key role in reducing network downtime. The solutions monitor the network traffic to indicate any device or network failures. 

Network performance monitoring solutions help preemptively discover and rectify issues that may lead to network downtime. It allows the solution to ensure maximum service availability.

Reducing Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) by Observing Bandwidth Usage

Network performance issues lead to financial costs and require a fair amount of time to rehabilitate. Here the network performance monitoring solutions observe the network bandwidth.

In case, the bandwidth utilization reaches a critical level it alerts the network. It helps identify the problem area and provide resolution at the earliest.

The network performance monitoring solutions help maintain the quality of service. It ensures the network protocols are correctly up and running.  

Develop Network Performance Reports

Network performance monitoring solutions regularly track and display performance data. The solutions develop reports that can be reviewed and observed for progress. 

Businesses can also select schedules to develop reports on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.

Identifying Performance Issues After Hours

Performance issues in networks may occur at any time. It may happen during or after working hours.

Here, network performance monitoring solutions constantly observe the network’s performance. It helps discover issues in the network and alert the IT teams.

Works toward Business Growth

A strong network performance monitoring solution also plays a role when the business grows. New devices, end-users, applications, servers, etc are connected to the network to cater to new requirements.

It is important to understand the network’s functions and capabilities to manage and control new business agendas. Hence, a robust network performance monitoring solution must be employed for an expanding and functional business.