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Network Assessment When shopping for network performance software, you should first assess the needs of your network. If you run a small family-owned business, your needs are going to be considerably different than the network performance solution that a Fortune company might require. Remember to be realistic — you get what you pay for. Products with price tags that seem too good to be true are most likely lacking vital features. At the same time, products costing hundreds or thousands of dollars might contain far more features than you require.
Look for Free Trials Free trials are enormously beneficial. They give you the opportunity to test whether or not the network performance software is a right match. Not only can you ensure that the product fulfills your needs, the trial offer also allows you to assess how easy the software is to navigate.
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What if I said troubleshooting these slow network problems can be just as, if not more, frustrating? The work is tedious and often a long process as you must check every point along with your network for issues, including your Wi-Fi signal strength, network speeds, network connections, servers, routers, and so on.
What Is Network Analysis? Why Does Network Analysis Matter? NPM is a comprehensive network analysis tool that can quickly determine faults and Wi-Fi network performance issues alongside a broad range of other network analysis tools. NTA also includes the ability to create application traffic baselines and alerts, as well as several security features to help you detect malicious traffic. If web-based and cloud server aspects of your network are running slowly, one of the first things to check is any issues with your Wi-Fi—this is where network analysis comes in.
Network analysis decodes the data passing through the network and displays it in a readable format. Network analysis tools can perform tasks such as:. Sometimes a network analyzer will be standalone hardware with software installed on it, while other times it will be software installed on a computer as part of the network.
The main differences between network analysis tools involve which parts of the network the tool focuses on, the number of protocols they can decode as well as the quality of this process , how the user interface looks, and what graphs or data analysis it can produce. A network analyzer helps your enterprise run an efficient and optimized network by discovering any performance issues before they affect the whole network or reach the end user. In an enterprise setting, many people use network analysis to fulfill parts of their jobs: system administrators, security experts, programmers, and network engineers.
If your business relies heavily on cloud- or web-based systems or uses a large Wi-Fi network with a lot of users, ensuring the network is functioning correctly is vital. When the network faces a problem, it can cause minor issues resulting in lost productivity, or major issues causing lost revenue or losses in reputation due to poor performance.
As Wi-Fi networks become more common, particularly in dense areas such as large cities, network analysis also becomes increasingly important. Wi-Fi works on a specific range of frequencies, and those frequencies are divided up into a limited number of channels.
Any Wi-Fi device can use those channels to communicate, but if too many devices try to communicate with Wi-Fi, all the channels become occupied. If there are too many devices using one channel, they can interfere with each other and will end up being unable to communicate.
But as more Wi-Fi networks exist, network congestion can arise as parts of the wireless spectrum on each channel become overwhelmed with connections. Wi-Fi network analysis can help you and your business optimize your Wi-Fi signal coverage and strength, so you can balance the network load better. From a Wi-Fi optimization perspective, using network analysis and monitoring tools to set baselines for network performance can help determine where and when an issue has come up.
You can also set alerts to tell you when the network is slowing down and highlight what devices on the network might be using up bandwidth. Many network analysis tools also allow you to create maps of Wi-Fi availability , such as heat maps, to show you where Wi-Fi signal is low.
Network performance tools also help validate whether there is a need to upgrade servers by looking at the historical records of your server performance. Good customer experience is quintessential for companies, and this also becomes the prime reason to monitor network performance. A network performance tool helps identify slow-performing devices along with findings of such poor performance.
These tools focus on the start and end of the data path, focusing on each network node to examine the performance at every point on the network. It also helps monitor the data transfer rate at every signal node and single out devices with poor performance. Apart from issue identification, a good tool also helps ensure continuous uptime, prevent outages, and detect and troubleshoot CPU and server bottlenecks like utilization, speed, and idle time.
Moreover, a good performance monitoring tool allows you to identify bandwidth hogs early on, enabling improved performance. A fully loaded performance monitoring tool also helps monitor and reduce packet loss due to errors and discards indicative of a problem with the switch or the device interacting with the switch. This enables you to allocate resources accordingly to prioritize traffic and react proactively to issues affecting your WAN network. While there are several network monitoring tools available in the market, choosing the right device with in-depth research and tracking capability is challenging.
These alerts can also be customized based on simple or complex nested trigger conditions, and for deeper visibility, it gives network insights and intelligent maps. SolarWinds NPM constantly monitors the performance and availability of network devices and helps troubleshoot when problems arise. With its intelligent network alerting feature, it apprises you of key performance metrics crossing your pre-defined thresholds, making you the first to know when issues occur.
It also helps resolve network connectivity issues quickly, as it tracks and displays your current and historical performance metrics in customizable charts and dashboards. A few of its key features include:. With SolarWinds, you get fault, performance, and availability monitoring along with quick detection and diagnosis. It has a customizable topology and dependency-aware intelligent alerts system capable of responding to a wide range of condition checks, correlated events, network topology, and device dependencies.
It can automatically discover and map devices, performance metrics, link utilization, and wireless coverage, and automatically calculate exhaustion dates using customizable thresholds based on peak and average usage.
With its comprehensive monitoring of the F5 BIG-IP family of products, you can visualize and gain insights on the performance of F5 service delivery environment, and its drag-and-discover feature lets you create an interactive performance chart network with real-time network performance metrics alongside interactive charts and graphs from your network devices.
Nagios is an open-source tool with an interactive web interface to monitor performance. It lets you track the current network status with your host status totals and service status totals, and the GUI is color-coded to help you see elements quickly.
Nagios supports external plug-ins to create and use in the form of executable files, plus shell scripts to track and collect metrics from every hardware and software in your network.
Nagios lets you monitor performance events through its color-coded alert system that sends out notifications by email and SMS, making it easier to prioritize critical alerts.
You can also use APIs to integrate other services into it. You can also check thousands of community plug-ins readily available on the Nagios Exchange if you need more options and additional features.
Nagios has two different plans. One is an open-source, free version limited to monitoring capabilities, and the other is a commercial version.
The commercial version is accessible due to its external plug-ins and gives a centralized view of the entire IT infrastructure,. The tool has escalation capabilities and proactively measures network downtime.
Zabbix is a free open-source tool with real-time monitoring of metrics collected from servers, virtual machines, and network devices via multi-platform Zabbix agents, SNMP and IPMI agents, agentless monitoring of user services, custom methods, calculation and aggregation, and end-user web monitoring.
It combines network, server, cloud, application, and services monitoring in a single unified solution. Its auto-discovery feature lets you locate network devices automatically and adds them to monitor. Zabbix can also detect configuration changes automatically, so you can tell if a device has been updated or not.
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