“The Network is so slow!” Gone are the days when users solely complained about the network being down. Be it a business-critical app or functional app, users expect incredibly fast performance on both LAN/WAN networks.
A recent survey, conducted by Redshift Research, revealed that 80% of business end-users aren’t even willing to wait an hour to contact their IT departments when they experience an app performance or availability issue. That said, optimal network and application performance is a necessity for businesses of all sizes. Here are 5 common issues end-users might face as a result of slow network:
1. Increase in amount of time spent in using applications to complete a job
2. Hinders employees’ ability to conduct daily job functions, especially remote employees
3. Employees workload increases while they wait for network or app issues to be resolved
4. Causes project delays, making it difficult to meet employer work expectations and deadlines
5. Impacts time-critical financial and or business functions that rely on app performance
With a wide range of business and social apps on your network, each application has specific requirements when it comes to bandwidth, delay, jitter, etc. However, while all network traffic might be receiving equal treatment, the end result could still be poor network performance. For example, time-dependent multi-media applications like video streaming are severely affected due to delay and jitter, whereas data-backup applications rely mainly on bandwidth utilization.
A good way to stay on top of performance issues is toeffectively spot issues that might slow down the network performance. With performance monitoring you can see what makes up your traffic. Having access to historical data is helpful, but alone it doesn't give you any kind of competitive advantage, as it only gives data on unusual patterns during specific intervals. That’s why it’s necessary to be able to view continuous live metrics.
To get live network statistics, you can utilize real-time troubleshooting software. With such software, you can obtain response time statistics for selected nodes by configuring polling interval, metrics, and thresholds based on your requirements. You can even set the polling interval to collect statistics as frequently as every 5 seconds.
Ideally, the response-time statistics would display the details of the device name, current, min/max, and average response time values, including warning and critical thresholds in real time.
Productivity, revenue, and overall user satisfaction suffers when an app you rely on doesn't perform as expected. As a network engineer, these issues tend to fall on your plate. Instead of attributing delays to various causes like an unstable Internet connection or overloaded servers, you likely prefer to have all the facts in place and fix the issue. Armed with right troubleshooting tools, you can see how your Internet connection performs or how fast your own webserver responds. Now, the question is, what is your way of managing the ubiquitous slow-performance pet-peeve?