8 Benefits of Network Performance Monitoring Solutions

What are the benefits of network performance monitoring solutions? The modern business can’t survive without a functional, high-performing network. If your enterprise’s network isn’t performing at the levels required of it, how can you expect to satisfy user and client demands? To that end, network performance monitoring solutions allow businesses to continuously observe their network for performance problems and take steps to fix them.

The basic benefit of network monitoring solutions is tracking various network performance metrics; however, monitoring tools have many more advantages than that. How else can network monitoring solutions help your business create a better network? We’ve listed eight of the top benefits of network performance monitoring tools below!

Looking for more info on the benefits of network monitoring solutions? You should check out our 2019 Network Monitoring Buyer’s Guide! The guide contains profiles on the top network monitoring providers in the market today, including descriptions of the tools they offer and noteworthy features of each. The guide also features 10 questions you should ask prospective vendors and yourself before buying a network monitoring solution — allowing you to easily determine the best network monitoring tool for your needs. You can check out that guide here!

Maintaining full network visibility

You can’t adequately understand your network’s performance if you don’t have full network visibility. Your company needs to be able to observe every bit of traffic that travels through your network, as well as monitor every connected device and examine common performance metrics. Any network monitoring tool worth its salt will provide comprehensive monitoring capabilities that doesn’t leave any portion of your network in the dark. That way, there won’t be performance-affecting problems hiding somewhere on your network.

Discovering security threats

While network monitoring solutions are primarily designed for performance monitoring purposes, they can also help you find security threats lurking in your system. Some malware and viruses are designed to stay put on a network after they’ve gained access without doing anything initially; others might be performing small actions that would be undetectable to the human eye. Network monitoring solutions will observe a network for unusual and suspicious network traffic (indicating a security threat is drawing network resources) and alert your company to the problem.

Predicting and preventing network downtime

You can never guarantee 100% service uptime, even with the most powerful network monitoring solution — but they can help you prevent unexpected network outages. A key function of network monitoring solutions is observing for network traffic that indicates the failure of a device or network is about to happen. This way, your enterprise can preemptively correct any unexpected downtime, allowing you to maximize service availability wherever possible.

Observing bandwidth utilization

For most network administrators, bandwidth usage is one of the most important performance metrics to analyze. Ideally, your company wants to be using as much bandwidth as possible while ensuring that every service is running efficiently. A network monitoring solution will track bandwidth usage, inform your network when bandwidth utilization is reaching critical levels, and ensure that quality-of-service (QoS) protocols are running correctly.

Reducing mean time to repair (MTTR)

Network performance issues don’t just pose a financial cost; the time it takes your network team to repair a problem could be spent on other, more important tasks. As such, reducing the time between when a performance issue occurs and when it’s fixed is essential for businesses. Network monitoring solutions alert your team to performance issues as soon as they discover them, meaning a company can get straight to work addressing the problem. Many monitoring tools also include diagnostics tools that provide your team with an initial assessment of the issue, so your employees don’t need to spend as much time diagnosing the problem.

Testing changes to a network or device

Whenever you make a change to your network or a device, you need to test it to ensure that it’s performing as you expect. Adding or reconfiguring a device can screw up the rest of your network if it isn’t implemented properly. Network monitoring tools allow you to test new or updated hardware and connections, letting you see if they could cause problems before they negatively impact your network.

Generating network performance reports

A network monitoring solution constantly tracks performance data and displays it via visual representations on their dashboard. Monitoring tools can also generate reports that your enterprise can review, converting them into several printable file types. Your company can choose the schedule that the solution generates these reports on — weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.

Finding performance issues that occur after business hours

Performance issues can occur at any time, even when there isn’t anybody in the office to fix them. If a problem happens after business hours, your enterprise needs to know about it; network monitoring tools continuously observe a network, meaning that they can discover these issues for you. A solid network monitoring solution won’t send out the alerts for these issues immediately, however, since those alerts could be lost by the time your team comes back to work. Ideally, the solution will delay the alert until a time determined by the network administrator.

Looking for a solution to help you improve your network performance? Our Network Monitoring Buyer’s Guide contains profiles on the top network performance monitoring vendors, as well as questions you should ask providers and yourself before buying.

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