Network Latency Problems and What Tools can Help

I remember the first time I dealt with network latency, it was back when I was playing Counter-Strike on my ancient PC. It was easy enough to deal with back then since I was only working with a single network device. Nobody had a laptop, smartphone, tablet, or smart fork in my house back in 2001. It’s not nearly as simple now as it was then. Network latency is a massive concern with the increase in connected devices.

Most IT teams have a lot more than my simple computer in 2001. Regardless, networks were much easier to map out than they are now. Networks were clearly defined. Teams knew who was using what programs for the most part, as they were responsible for hosting the data in-house. Employees were in the office working, rather than remotely accessing a cloud. With the trend of enterprise networks shifting to SaaS and cloud services, it’s not a mystery that networks are more complex to map out and finding network latency issues are harder. Network monitoring solutions are here to help.

Manual monitoring is dead

It doesn’t make sense to manually monitor a network anymore. It’s impossible to do with efficiency. Automated network performance monitoring tools are essential to maintaining network health. You have employees working from home, a café, etc. and you need visibility into those endpoints. The distribution of cloud access is so wide, monitoring tools are there to be supportive of this.

Network latency issues can directly impact performance across the company. Being able to catch these problems before they become a negative issue is essential. For example, remote workers need to access a meeting via VoIP software. If the network isn’t stable enough for this, then an employee can miss out on crucial information.

Network monitoring solutions are critical to obtaining a consistent workflow amongst your wide array of employees. Almost no major enterprise solely works from a dedicated office or datacenter. Having the proper systems in place is the difference between maintaining success and falling behind your competition.

The benefits of a network monitoring tool

Many people believe their service providers can give them the information they need or help them solve a problem. This might be the case for your personal internet at home, but this kind of monitoring is not adequate for an enterprise. Network teams need more information than ISPs provide them. Network performance monitoring vendor, ThousandEyes, even has an ISP monitoring solution because ISPs don’t do enough. They go as far as to state “Keep your service providers honest about internet performance.” We all know ISPs can be shady to consumers, there’s nothing keeping them from being shady to an enterprise.

This is also the case for SaaS or cloud services. These services do not provide the detailed information you need during an outage. For example, a dedicated network monitoring tool would have prevented the recent Tesla hack. It would have been simple for this automated tool to notice a change in normal network behavior. The network team would have seen unusual behavior by utilizing the constant performance monitoring.