The growing trend towards remote work has become the new normal for most modern businesses. As a result, businesses with multiple branches, offices, and data centers around the world are taking on the new challenge of monitoring network performance of multiple remote locations.
Luckily, remote network performance monitoring helps businesses and IT departments monitor network health in various remote offices.
First time hearing about remote network performance monitoring? Here is a quick overview of what it is and how it can help your IT team sustain a growing business.
What is Remote Network Monitoring?
Remote network monitoring extends the reach of a traditional network performance monitoring solution to help you monitor network performance of remote locations and equipment, without requiring remote IT resources.
Most modern networks span across many different branches or locations. That means that businesses have remote offices and equipment located in multiple locations that they need to monitor and keep an eye on.
Making sure routers, switches, and other network equipment is performing optimally is critical to smooth business operations, but distributed networks can be a challenge for traditional centralized monitoring software.
Remote network performance monitoring allows IT specialists and network administrators to monitor network performance no matter where your network devices (or you) are located. It’s an ideal solution for managed service providers (MSPs) or organizations with multiple locations, a growing remote workforce, or traveling consultants.
A distributed network performance monitoring solution like Obkio network performance monitoring software allows you to install network monitoring agents at strategic locations such as data centers, remote offices, and your main office, to monitor network performance between all those agents.
Think your company could benefit from it? Keep reading to learn about 5 benefits of using remote network performance monitoring.
1. Distributed Network Monitoring Strategy
Many businesses use SaaS and Cloud services that are no longer hosted in a centralized location.
That’s why a distributed remote network monitoring solution allows you to use a distributed monitoring strategy, which uses information provided by multiple network monitoring agents to determine the performance status of different parts of your network, independently from conditions that may affect the other agents.
It allows you to assess the performance of separate applications, network devices, and different ends of your network to determine whether it is a network or application issue.
2. Monitor Network Performance Across Multiple Locations
If your network spans across multiple locations, offices or branches, a remote network monitoring software allows you to manage devices in every location.
For example, let’s say you manage the network for a pharmaceutical chain with many different pharmacies across the country. Remote network monitoring gives you visibility into how devices in your central location, as well as all the remote locations, are performing.
Deploy network monitoring agents at various locations, such as remote offices and data centers, to continuously test and monitor performance between locations. You can then easily monitor the global health of all your remote locations using a dashboard that displays all your agents and monitoring sessions at once.
3. No Local IT Resources Required
Most companies don’t have an army of IT resources in every location – most businesses have a small IT team stationed in one location who are generally responsible for managing the entire network.
With remote network monitoring, if a network problem occurs, IT specialists don’t need to travel to that location to troubleshoot. They can use a remote network monitoring software to collect information from certain LAN sites without having to reach the site, set up IT equipment, and identify issues.
Any consultants or managed service providers (MSPs) responsible for monitoring client network performance can also benefit from the ability to monitor a remote location without being on site.
4. Monitoring From the End-User Perspective
The end-user perspective is what defines good or bad performance. Whether it’s your client, employee, or yourself, network performance is based on the network’s ability to meet a user’s expectations. That’s why it’s important to monitor network performance from the end-user perspective.
Network monitoring agents can exchange synthetic traffic between each other to continuously measure network performance as if they were actual users. They provide data on performance metrics as if they were users from different remote branches or offices within your business’ infrastructure.
So if your colleague in another city starts experiencing network slowness, you can use remote network monitoring to monitor network performance from their perspective, and quickly identify problems.
5. Locate Network Problems Anywhere Along Your Network
Lastly, the most important use of remote network monitoring is to locate and identify network issues anywhere along your network, easily pinpoint the location of a problem, and identify if the network is even responsible.
It also helps you identify, locate, and troubleshoot issues before they start affecting end-users. So you can ensure that you’re always providing your end-users with the best user experience possible.
Finally, it allows you to easily troubleshoot network slowdowns and not just hard failures. Any performance degradation can be the sign of an upcoming, much larger issue, so it’s important to find and fix slowdowns before they turn into larger problems.
Implementing Remote Network Monitoring Software
Remote network performance monitoring software is either a solution on its own or may be offered as a feature on a regular network performance monitoring software (or NPM).
Network performance monitoring software is a solution that continuously monitors network performance between official sites (company head office, main business center), data centers, cloud systems, and applications in real-time to quickly find and fix network problems like network delays, data loss, lagging, and more.
A remote network performance monitoring software does the same thing, but for remote offices.
Remote work is on the rise, and now is the right time to start implementing remote network monitoring for your business. You’ll be thanking yourself when offices become obsolete and your IT team can fix problems before employees even have a chance to complain about them.
