How to Make Troubleshooting Problems Easier with Network Monitoring

Everybody wishes it wasn’t the case, but unfortunately, your enterprise is going to have a problem with its technology. Especially when you’ve just introduced a new deployment into your infrastructure, issues with a technology are an inevitability. As such, troubleshooting problems with business technologies is an important part of the IT team’s work, but without the right mindset and tools, it can be an incredibly challenging one as well. This applies to troubleshooting network performance problems as well.

When a performance issue on your network occurs, your network team needs to start troubleshooting the issue immediately. Without this troubleshooting process, network teams won’t understand the root cause of a problem. Network monitoring tools are an invaluable way for IT teams to discover and identify problems quickly. How can a network monitoring solution assist your enterprise in troubleshooting performance problems?

Discovering the location of a network problem

Usually, the first step in troubleshooting a problem on your network is finding and locating where the problem is located. Some performance problems will affect the entirety of a network while others will be confined to a particular area. Whether or not an issue is isolated, your network team needs to know which areas of your network are affected when troubleshooting. Network monitoring tools scan the entirety of a network for performance problems; it can tell you which devices and connections are affected.

Troubleshooting network performance problems visually

Sometimes, in order to fully understand a problem on your network, you need to be able to visualize it. Performance issues can be detected by your workers manually, but they might be too small for your enterprise to detect without a network monitoring solution. Network monitoring solutions display visual information about your network performance, such as graphs that represent performance metrics. For example, if your bandwidth usage is reaching dangerous levels, you’ll be able to see it through a network monitoring dashboard.

Reducing troubleshooting time for your network team

Many network monitoring solutions come equipped with diagnostics and analytics capabilities. This means that your network team can apply automated troubleshooting analysis to any performance problem that occurs. Since the tool can provide diagnostics to an issue right after it is discovered, the monitoring solution will provide your team with vital information about a problem before it begins fixing them.

Alerting you to network problems as they happen

Network monitoring tools analyze a network for performance issues in real-time. They also feature intelligent alert systems to help your enterprise learn about these problems as they happen. When a solution discovers a performance problems, it sends an alert to your network team that describes the problem and where it is located. Many monitoring tools also tier these alerts by importance; therefore, if a critical issue and a minor problem happen at the same time, your team will learn about the critical issue first.

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

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