Improving Network Performance Management
A network must perform to optimal capacity for a businesses IT operations to run efficiently.
Having a sub-optimal performing network risks an array of issues to a business’s IT infrastructure and daily operations. It is the responsibility of your IT administrative team to ensure that your network performance is tailored to and caters for your business needs.
Running Network Performance Analysis on Your IT Network
To stress-test your IT network performance, many IT support teams will run what’s called a ‘Network Performance Analysis’.
A Network Performance Analysis essentially tests your IT network operations versus IT operations that do not use the network to identify whether the Network is the issue.
An example of this might be a read and write programme running slowly whereas everything else is running to optimal performance.
There are many varying reasons why an IT network might be underperforming and so this type of analysis allows you to understand what parts of your IT network performance require optimisation.
Many tools run IT network performance audits – most of these will audit your entire network infrastructure with a slight focus on IT network performance optimisation, so be mindful of this when running a tool to audit network performance.
Network Performance Measurement Tools
Network performance monitoring tools come in two types: passive and active.
Passive measures existing network applications to measure performance. This tool is used to minimise disruption and generates realistic assessments of user experience in its testing method.
Active network performance measuring tools generates data that can be used to create a performance baseline and optimising for pre-set routines. This is a tool that must be scheduled to optimise against the impact of network traffic.
Network Performance Measurement – What Are We Looking For?
Your IT support team will be auditing optimising network performance for the following issues:
Network Performance Bottlenecks
Performance bottlenecks are one of the most common issues networks encounter. Optimising for device performance is key to reducing bottlenecks in performance. If a device speed is reduced, it causes a ‘Mexican Wave’ of impact that spreads across the network and reduces network performance.
This is where network performance measuring tools come into play, especially passive tools. They monitor network device performance, looking for bottlenecks and slow traffic.
Excessive Bandwidth Usage
Each critical user and device has an efficient bandwidth amount to help them run applications optimally. However, if an application or user exceeds the bandwidth threshold, this can limit and reduce network performance.
Poor Hardware Configuration
Poor hardware configuration is another common issue in reducing network performance. When a new device is installed or an old device reconfigured to a network, your IT support team needs to test the device to ensure that it’s been configured correctly.
Failure to do so again results in an imbalance in performance, contributing to issues like excessive bandwidth and network performance bottlenecks that can harm your network performance.
Broken Devices
Broken or malfunctioning devices contribute to IT network nodes and performance. Disabled or malfunctioning devices can impact nodes and performance within your businesses IT network infrastructure. Again, network monitoring tools detect improper performance of nodes/devices and notify IT administrators immediately.
The Benefits of Running Network Performance Management
Network performance management has plenty of benefits for both your businesses technical IT operations and efficiency, along with optimising device and network performance for your operational output efficiency, too.
Threat Detection Through Network Monitoring
Not everyone knows the importance of network performance monitoring to business cybersecurity. However, networking monitoring solutions not only monitor efficiency and performance generally but also help you to spot cybersecurity threats that may be hiding in your network.
Issues such as malware and viruses designed to lock on to networks to help cybercriminals to gain access to your IT system. Network monitoring systems observe networks to identify unusual/suspicious activity allowing for IT administrators to monitor and resolve security threats.
Delivering Critical Services
Network performance monitoring allows you to avoid disruptions to the network, reducing troubleshooting time and allows the business to provide critical services to clients or your internal network to remain operational.
Bandwidth Analysis
Similar to bottlenecks, IT network management minimises network connectivity and bandwidth issues by monitoring device utilisation and optimising for bandwidth requirements. This reduces imbalances and reductions in network performance for business-critical applications.
Preventing Network Downtime
Naturally, IT maintenance will be required at some point throughout the lifecycle of your businesses IT system. IT network performance monitoring allows you to prevent any unexpected network outages, observing network traffic for failure indicators or device harm. This predicts and manages the impact of any failures that could result in downtime by actioning solutions immediately.
Requesting an IT Network Performance Audit
To learn more about how your business could benefit from an IT Network Performance Audit, or to learn more about the service we welcome you to contact us today. For additional IT support services in Oxford, check out our IT technical services.