Internet network performance monitoring is an overlooked way to assess how well and how consistently your ethernet and your Wi-Fi is acting. Whether you’ve just begun or you want to implement a solution, consider the following dos and don’ts for your network performance monitoring.
The Dos
- Do keep it simple. “It” being the monitoring system; if it is complicated, no one will really use it. Monitoring systems should also be affordable–the cost of monitoring should not be more expensive than the cost of supplying the system.
- Do understand that the ultimate goal of internet performance monitoring is to provide a good, consistent user experience. Information on service performance is collected to give an overall picture, including benchmarks and fluctuations, of the kind of user experience your network is providing. From there, you can look at how to address any relevant issues as well as what steps you need to take to improve user experience.
- Do keep in mind that the metrics of network performance monitoring have two directions:
- Communication with stakeholders, users, and partners to show them how well the network and service performs over time.
- Technical monitoring that runs the service up to its limits and solves capacity problems.
Both of these are points of information that you want to regularly monitor in case of pushback from stakeholders or future issues in the service.
The Don’ts
- Don’t flood the system with false alarms. While it’s important to establish benchmarks and understand your thresholds, you can curate the information so you get a few meaningful alerts rather than endless interactions (and risk missing an important alarm in all of that noise).
- Don’t overdo monitoring to the point where it affects performance. You want to be a non-impactful observer, not a heavy user, who records relevant information.
- Don’t use a complaints driven model to monitor the system. If a problem occurs and you react to it in the moment, the process for resolving the issue can be costly and time consuming. By contrast, if you’re proactively implementing network performance monitoring, you have the opportunity to actively resolve your network performance issues before they can affect your service.
Final Thoughts
The last point worth discussing is this: don’t rely on the fox to guard the henhouse. In other words, don’t rely on the person providing your service to tell you how good to it is; actively ensure that your service provider is meeting the standards of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and hold them accountable.
Network performance monitoring gives you insight into how well your organization’s service is performing over time and helps you decide if a future investment is needed. The keys are to keep monitoring simple; be proactive about potential issues rather than reactive; and ensure that your SLA is being met.
For more information on the dos and don’ts of internet performance measurement, please contact us today.
