Three Ways to Assure Network Quality

What is the quality of your network? More to the point, what is the quality of the network experience? Do your employees think that your network is slow? Merely adequate? Speedy?

At the highest level, this is what network operations teams need to understand how to answer. And this needs to be answered no matter how complicated the network path is between endpoints. We’ll take a look at three things that can help you get a handle on these questions.

1. Do you have the ability to collect information about the key points of the network paths that are a priority for your organization?

To answer this question, you need to understand your network architecture. Look at points of ingress and egress across the network as well as any known bottlenecks. Identify all parts of the network including data centers, secondary locations, branches, etc. Equally important is to understand the elements of the overall network path which you do not own such as cloud services. Identifying different user personas and how they use and depend on the network is also important. And if your external customers are using services you provide, you’ll need a view of how they are distributed geographically.

With this understanding of your network, you can begin to place monitoring points in key points that cover the end-to-end network paths that are important to your business.

2. Have you established active monitoring that gives you a view of network quality?

Active monitoring is a must have to understand the quality of your network, even when users are not present. By sending test packets across key network paths, you can begin to get an objective view of performance in real time that gives you a picture of network quality. And active monitoring helps put you in a proactive position - something that passive monitoring of actual usage cannot always do. Active monitoring can help you know of potential problems at any time on any network so you can safeguard network quality.

3. Are you reviewing the active monitoring you have in place?

With monitoring points placed appropriately to allow you to actively monitor key network paths, you will gain the visibility that allows you to assure network quality. As you start to gain visibility, you may face the inevitable challenge of too much information - a problem that often plagues operations teams. As the network changes, you may also find that you have new blindspots - essentially, too little information. By developing a regular cadence for the review of the active monitoring you have in place, you can evolve and continuously ensure network quality. Changes to the network or priorities might mean you need to focus on new network paths and discontinue others. You can iteratively assess any gaps or ignore paths that don’t matter.

Check out this in-depth white paper to learn how you can understand and safeguard network experience and network quality for your organization.