Active monitoring: why is it important for your business?

The last decade has seen a tremendous change in enterprise networking. The rise of mobile devices and IoT has helped make people more connected. Mobile communications have played a fundamental part in shaping our society, connecting us with people across the world. However, with increased connectivity comes increased network complexity and, consequently, increased risk.

In addition, user experience and quality of experience (QoE) monitoring are becoming a key indicator of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, business objectives and outcomes. Today, enterprises are still more comfortable monitoring network QoS than true customer experience or QoE. Check out our 6 truths about QoE monitoring for virtualized networks blog to learn more about QoE.

The problem, however, is that customer satisfaction is largely driven by QoE. Being unable to monitor QoE puts enterprise business models at risk as they need to gather QoE metrics and real-time monitoring of service performance and the true end–user experience. End customers rely more heavily on mobile connectivity as a way of life (think Generation C in consumer culture), so QoE is fast becoming the competitive differentiator.

With such complex networks and quality of experience requirements, traditional approaches to monitor network performance don’t cut it anymore. You cannot simply rely on a solution that only shows you the problem when your network is down. You need a new proactive approach — one that enables you to start identifying problems before they affect your end-users and thus your customers QoE.

Measuring network performance with active monitoring

Often times performance monitoring solutions use several different methods of analysis to determine the performance of a network. By using a combination of methods, such solutions provide a more refined set of performance data that give you a better picture of your network. Two of the most common methods of performance monitoring are active monitoring and passive monitoring.

Active monitoring, or high-definition network testing, performs end-to-end monitoring between nodes. It basically simulates traffic by sending synthetic packet data to multiple endpoints across your network. This is done through sensors (sometimes known as probes) injecting a large number of test packets into the network that are then recorded to calculate key performance indicators (KPIs) like packet loss and latency. By proactively probing your network for vulnerabilities and using performance analytics for behavior correlation, you could pinpoint potential problems before they reveal themselves to you, or to your end users that rely on you for an exceptional digital experience.

While active monitoring doesn’t measure real network traffic, it does allow you to see the potential problem areas before they affect users. Thanks to real-time analytics, you can eliminate blind spots by gaining info on performance everywhere on your network.

Active monitoring takes a proactive approach to network troubleshooting by highlighting potential problem areas before they affect the end-user. Because they are easily deployed as software in distributed architectures, active monitoring sensors also allow you to target specific areas of the network, enabling you to see how new connections affect network performance.

That proactive analysis is precisely why active monitoring is fundamental for your enterprise IT strategy. Because it does not require an outage or degradation to alert you of problems, you can identify issues long before they cause downtime for your end-users. This doesn’t just save considerable amounts of time and money for your business, it also prevents network outages that would negatively impact the business and drive down your user experience and satisfaction, or QoE.

To conclude, active monitoring does require predictive data (through analytics, correlation etc…), and thus doesn’t always provide 100% accurate results. Consequently, for complete end-to-end visibility into application, service, and network performance, as well as customer experience, enterprises need to use instrumentation that combines active monitoring, passive monitoring, and other complementary 3^rd party data. All ingesting and driving in real-time by predictive analytics, AI, and machine learning (ML).

Check out our Skylight solution to learn how you too can enhance network performance, Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) visibility—at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.