Network monitoring is an important focus for any company relying on their network to conduct business. The importance of this element is one thing that is causing hesitancy for solution providers, value-added resellers and others to make the jump to hosted or virtualized information technology.
As captured in a recent CRN post, networking monitoring is important – yet also challenging when the network is actually the Internet itself.
Over the last ten years, a number of powerful applications and appliances have emerged in the solution provider channel that will allow for constant network monitoring to ensure performance. One powerful solution is Wireshark, free software that can trace whether a network is performing as expected or if there is a big problem ready to rear its ugly head.
The situation changes when the infrastructure of the enterprise is actually based on a Software-as-a-Service platform. Network monitoring becomes more of a challenge when the network is connected to the physical enterprise by cables connected from unseen areas.
Network latency introduces significant challenges for applications like CRM as even little blips or delays can lead to significant drops in customer retention or customer satisfaction.
Internet performance network monitoring tools from Keynote Systems (News - Alert) helps to keep tabs on performance inside networks, across networks and across very-far-flung networks. Keynote offers a worldwide network of test nodes that include more than PCs and servers in more than 240 places to optimize network monitoring opportunities.
Keynote measures providers and carriers such as NTT, AT&T, Verizon, Cogent, Level3, Qwest, Savvis, SBC, Sprint (News - Alert) and XO. To optimize network monitoring, the company focuses on latency, response time and packet loss, measured connection by connection.
Keynote also offers a variety of enterprise-level, proprietary solutions that can measure Web application performance across far-flung networks. Such network monitoring solutions include Keynote Web Performance Monitoring, and self- and managed-services for Web Load Testing. All services are graphical and dashboard-based, and also provide real-time statistics on the performance of the network.
Overall, network monitoring is a best practice, whether the network is on-premise or hosted or virtual. A number of cloud service companies actually provide their own service-performance data as part of the standard service-level agreement (SLA). If uptime or performance requirements are not met, “make-goods” can often come into play.
With the baseline network monitoring solution from Keynote, the enterprise can be sure that the network is performing according to expectations, or take the steps necessary to improve operation.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Erin Monda