The time for happy gatherings of family and friends is upon us. It’s a joyous time of the year, at least it is once you get there. It’s the travel that we dread – unending traffic, long lines at toll booths, hazards causing us to re-route our path, flight delays due to system malfunctions… too many people trying to get somewhere they need to be all at the same time. Your network is the same. If you overcrowd it with too many actions all at once, you’re going to experience slowdowns, packet loss, poor performance, and it’s going to hit you right in the bottom line.
Our partners at Masergy tell us more:
Lagging network performance can be one of a company’s most frustrating problems. Something is creating more traffic than the network can handle. That much is clear. But the exact nature may not be clear to IT administrators. That’s because service incidents may be due to any of several root causes, including:
– Administrator oversight
– Improper classification of services
– Application bandwidth usage
– Asset capacity
– Configuration error
– Software vulnerabilities
– Hardware failureAll this matters — a lot. Eighty percent of companies lose revenue when their networks go down, with the average loss at $140,000, according to a recent survey of IT professionals in the U.S., U.K. and Canada.
Often network lags are caused by a “top talker,” a user, device or application that’s using too much bandwidth, using bandwidth at inopportune times or even operating without IT’s knowledge. And until these top talkers are identified, the network’s issues are difficult to resolve.
For example, when one of our clients complained of network issues, we discovered that the company was replicating its storage area network (SAN) during a time that, while off-hours for the headquarters location, was peak time for another of its regional operations. That created a major bandwidth logjam. Resolving the issue was straightforward: Reschedule the SAN replication for another time that doesn’t overlap with peak hours of business operations.
Also, due to the rise of easy-to-launch cloud services and the expansion of “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies, users may be generating traffic from applications and device their CIOs and other senior IT executives don’t even know exist.
When we travel, there are a handful of monitoring apps, like Waze, that we can use to help us re-route and save us time. When it comes to your network, a network monitoring solution is the answer. Network monitoring through CTG provides real-time analysis and reporting against service level agreements and gives you constant performance results, which can provide an early warning of telltale signs that something may be beginning to fail. This continuous monitoring and assessment provides a platform for planning and scheduling installations of new applications and services and can also provide valuable acumen into data loss problems, packet loss, latency and jitter.
Learn more about assessing and improving your network performance by downloading our eBook, Perfecting Network Performance.
