Ad Image

Making the Business Case for Network Monitoring Solutions

Making the Business Case for Network Monitoring Solutions

Making the Business Case for Network Monitoring Solutions

How do you write the business case for adding a network performance monitoring solution to your company’s infrastructure? In order to keep track of performance issues, network administrators will deploy monitoring solutions that continuously observe a network and track specific performance metrics. These tools are no doubt useful for your network team, but how do you convince your enterprise that a network monitoring solution is worth the investment?

When you decide to adopt a network monitoring solution, you’ll have to create a business case and present it to your company. What should this business case include if you want the best chance to convince management that your company needs a network monitoring solution? Below, we’ve listed some ways to improve your network monitoring business case and crucial details it needs to have.

After you’ve made the business case for a network monitoring solution, the next step is choosing the right tool for your needs. Our 2019 Network Monitoring Buyer’s 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. You can check out that guide here!

Download Link to Data Integration Buyers Guide

Identify your network performance needs

First things first — what specific network problems does your company need to address? Does your network team need a better way to track network performance statistics and metrics? Does it need better insights into performance to address consistent problems? Is it having problems proactively fixing network performance issues before they happen? To help convince upper management that a network monitoring solution is worth it, you need to communicate to them the issues your network team is having and how network monitoring tools can help.

Research what network monitoring solutions can do

At their core, every network monitoring solution will deliver insights on network performance and alert your network team to critical performance issues. However, network monitoring vendors will include specific features and capabilities into their tools that may be useful to your enterprise in eliminating performance issues. In prepping for making a business case, you should examine the features of noteworthy network performance monitoring solutions. (Our Buyer’s Guide is the perfect resource for this!)

Features shared by numerous network monitoring tools, like performance analysis, visualizations, and intelligent alerting should be noted, as it might be worthwhile to mention them in your business case.

Can you build your own network monitoring tool?

Depending on your enterprise’s resources and development skills, it may be possible for you to build your own proprietary network monitoring tool. This will allow you to eliminate licensing costs and use a solution that has no unnecessary features for your company. However, you need to examine your company’s ability to develop this kind of solution before you suggest it in your business case. If it wouldn’t be worth the cost to develop, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Prove a decent return on investment

In order to successfully campaign for network monitoring technology, you need to prove to the company that a solution will provide a decent return on investment (ROI). It isn’t just enough to say that network monitoring tools will improve network performance — that much is obvious. You’ll also want to explain the cost of network performance issues and why they need to be addressed.

These costs shouldn’t just focus on financial losses, though those are undoubtedly important to mention. You should also point out how network availability, service quality, and customer/user experience are affected by performance problems. Whenever you can, you should include actual statistics on the cost of performance issues that affect your enterprise — the more specifics, the better. This way, you’ll identify actual problems that your business needs to fix — which then allows you to show how a network monitoring solution can solve them.


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.

Check us out on Twitter for the latest in Network Monitoring news and developments!

Download Link to Data Integration Buyers Guide

Share This

Related Posts