How to protect end-user experience with proactive network monitoring

Most of us have lived this nightmare: we’re on an important video call, whether an internal meeting or an external event such as a client meeting or demo, and video quality degrades. Words get garbled or dropped, video freezes and stutters, and the meeting goes on but is compromised. Or worse: the meeting has to be rescheduled entirely.

This is a familiar experience for many of us since the pandemic, and it all stems from network issues. Proactive network monitoring can avoid this problem.

Ensuring end-user experience matters more than ever

Digital services that run over the network provide the foundation for the bulk of business activity today. Backend software such as ERP runs in the cloud, calls are done over video and voice-over-IP, business applications are cloud-based, shop-floor machines ping and coordinate with servers on the network, and just about every other component of business operations also relies on network performance.

When there are bottlenecks, disruptions, and bandwidth issues, the effects are frequently felt by employees, customers, and computing devices that rely on network data.

On the benign end of the scale, these network performance issues slow down employees and create hassles such as botched online meetings. Productivity and job satisfaction go down. At the more dangerous end, network issues can cripple a business and seriously dent competitiveness, customer satisfaction and profitability.

Modern networks environments challenge end-user experience

The modern business network, often built on a hybrid cloud architecture, challenges reliable end-user experience. That’s because complexity has gone way up. The hybrid cloud architecture disperses network resources and creates extra layers of potential failure. Virtualization hinders visibility and further adds complexity. Increased network traffic volumes create scenarios where non-essential traffic sometimes block essential services. A hodgepodge of technologies from different vendors create network orchestration issues.

There’s more points of potential failure on the network than ever before, even as the reliance on the network has increased. At the same time as complexity has gone up, there’s also less visibility of what’s actually going on with the network.

Diagnosing performance issues gets tricky without full visibility

Uncovering performance issues and guaranteeing reliable end-user experience is hard when network engineers cannot get a full picture of what is taking place in the network. But, that’s reality of the situation today.

There are so many moving parts to the modern network, many that rely on vendor tools that operate in a silo, require enforcement of SLAs that are hard to monitor, or are beyond the reach of traditional network performance monitoring tools. Getting a true picture of the dynamics of network performance is hard at best and impossible at worst.

Spotting emerging network performance issues that will impact end-user experience become hard in this environment of poor network visibility.

Resolving issues with end-user experience that already are creating problems is just as hard, because tracking down the root cause of a network performance issue requires isolating the problem in the face of no unified network visibility. Lacking this visibility, root cause analysis often devolves into a blame game where the responsible party for each part of the network blames another part of the network.

Protecting end-user experience starts with end-to-end performance monitoring

These challenges with protecting end-user experience are not insurmountable, however. Businesses just need a modern network performance monitoring solution to handle the challenges of the modern network.

Protecting end-user experience today requires real-time performance monitoring along the entire network, not just part of it. When an organization’s network traffic is fully monitored end-to-end and proactively policed for emerging network issues, businesses reclaim the lost visibility and can spot and remediate performance issues before they become visible to the end user.

With end-to-end network traffic monitoring, network engineers also can quickly uncover the root cause of a performance degradation and definitively point to the part of the network that is creating the problem. This reduces root cause analysis time, and ends the finger pointing even when the issue originates with third-party service providers that are not meeting their SLAs.

As memorably put by the founder of financial data services provider, Bloomberg LP, “In God we trust. Everyone else, bring data.”

With end-to-end network traffic monitoring, a business brings the data to end the blame game over what’s causing network performance issues.

Meet Accedian Skylight

Accedian Skylight was built from the ground up to bring this level of performance monitoring needed to proactively protect end-user experience.

Skylight is a network and application performance monitoring solution that monitors network traffic-end-to-end with lightweight virtual sensors, then feeds this data into an easily understood dashboard that gives a complete, real-time picture of an organization’s network dynamics.

Skylight also enables businesses to feed in third-party data sources into this dashboard, correlating traffic data with the third-party tools and data sources for an even more complete picture of network and performance dynamics.

To see Accedian Skylight in action, schedule a custom demo today.