Most business and industrial operations now run on IT systems. While you might take several steps to guarantee the efficiency if your network, this does not make it fail proof. Other than your network’s failure, its security breach is an element you should be worried about.
Network performance monitoring is essential to avert these eventualities and their impact on your company’s operations. This encompasses several techniques designed for the maintenance of your network’s integrity and security.
There are several methods used for network monitoring by IT solution companies. These include intrusion detection, vulnerability scanning, intrusion detection, penetration testing, and firewall monitoring.
The technique employed for your network’s monitoring will, however, be as useful as the metrics it will collect. Here are some of the crucial parameters used to assess your network’s performance by IT experts.
Throughput
At its basic level, your network transmits data from a specific device to another. Throughput is a metric that will measure the rate at which your network will successfully transfer data over a specified period. It will show you how your network is working rather than what it is capable of accomplishing.
This determines if it is meeting its expectations. Most people confuse throughput with bandwidth. The latter is, however, the maximum data transfer rate in your network and is not as good an indicator of your network’s performance as throughput.
Latency
This marks the delay between the processing and sending of a signal. The IT experts will usually track the latency of your network between two sensors.
It is challenging and generally impossible to eliminate latency entirely. The goal of this metric is to reduce it as much as possible. This way, you do not spend considerable time waiting to receive your data after sending a signal.
Packet Loss
Your network should ideally transmit all bits of data with minimal loss. At times, however, data packets are lost. This means they do not reach their intended destination.
Network monitoring tools will detect any packets lost and at times establish the cause of this loss. As such, the tools should be frequently checked to check the frequency and amount of lost data and minimize future losses.
Retransmits
Once packet loss happens, your network will automatically resend any lost data to ensure it gets to its designated destination. The packets that should, however, be retransmitted will reduce the room needed for the new packets waiting for delivery.
The retransmit metric shows how your network will redeliver lost packets and their impact on new packets. You can use this metric to reduce the need for data retransmission as much as you can in your network.
There are several online vendors offering network performance monitoring tools at a fraction of what it would cost you to hire an IT company. It is thus tempting to reach for this seemingly cheaper alternative to save your company’s funds.
While these tools will collect the above metrics, they will not do much for your network’s optimal performance since you will still hire an expert to decode them. Outsourcing an IT agency for your network’s monitoring will thus prove the cheaper option in the long run.
