This guest blog post is by Obkio. We thank Obkio for being a sponsor.
Many traditional network performance monitoring solutions were designed before the arrival of hosted services, SaaS applications, and SD-WAN. These technologies depend on a high-performing network to function, but centralized monitoring solutions aren’t always able to adapt well to new decentralized and distributed architectures.
Obkio was created to fill this need. Obkio’s Network Performance Monitoring software monitors end-to-end network performance from the end user perspective. It’s simple to install and operate.
Obkio’s Key Features
Obkio monitors network performance using synthetic transactions. You install monitoring agents on devices in your network, which simulates the actual end-user experience and provides a comprehensive view of the path that end user traffic takes. Obkio also has monitoring agents installed in major public clouds for a global perspective.
Obkio offers a variety of features for network performance monitoring, with the ultimate goal of making the process easier and quicker. Capabilities include:
1) Network Performance Metric Measurement
Obkio continuously measures network performance metrics including:
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- Latency
- Jitter
- Packet Loss
2) Packet Duplication & Reordering Detection
Easily detect packet duplication and packet reordering in your network.
3) VoIP Quality Score
Obkio measures VoIP Quality based on MOS Score for every minute, whether there’s an ongoing call or not. This metric is perfect to measure Quality of Experience (QoE) for users.
4) SNMP Device Monitoring
Monitor the performance of networking devices such as firewalls, routers, switches, and Wi-Fi access points using SNMP polling.
With Ultra-Fast Polling (every 30 seconds), the results are far more precise than the traditional software polling, which usually occurs every 5 minutes. Obkio can then correlate the two data sources to see if the user’s devices are the cause of performance problems such as bandwidth congestion or CPU being over-utilized.
5) End-to-End Network Monitoring
Obkio monitors network performance using Network Monitoring Agents installed in different parts of the network for end-to-end coverage.
This allows you to monitor areas of your network or applications where you may not have any IT staff or equipment available. This is becoming more and more common with the increasing use of cloud applications and remote work.
6) Public Monitoring Agents
You can also monitor network performance with Public Monitoring Agents deployed by Obkio and service providers all around the world. Obkio already has agents deployed by major cloud providers such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS.
Users can monitor network performance up to service provider’s networks to help MSPs better support their clients when problems arise.
7) Speed Tests (On-Demand & Scheduled)
With Obkio, run speed tests to test your upload and download speeds over your Internet connection.
You can manually run speed tests between any monitoring agent inside the organization, including public monitoring agents. You can also schedule speed tests in Obkio’s app using templates.
8) Traceroutes
Traceroutes are the ultimate troubleshooting tool for IT pros. To help you troubleshoot network problems faster than ever, Obkio offers three different types of traceroutes.
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- Live Traceroutes: Perfect for live troubleshooting and allow you to share Traceroute data with MSPs and ISPs to help them troubleshoot your problems faster.
- Periodic Historical Traceroutes: Perfect to compare results of past routes.
- Triggered Traceroutes: Perfect for troubleshooting past network issues and events.
9) QoS and DSCP
Obkio monitors QoS (Quality of Service) based on DSCP to monitor each class of service in your LAN or WAN (MPLS or SD-WAN) including end-to-end DSCP propagation.
Essential Use Cases
There are many reasons to monitor network performance. Here are several key use cases.
1. Perform a Network Assessment
● Identify network issues:
A network assessment allows you to gather information about the current state of your network performance to identify where network problems are located, and what caused them.
You can use Obkio’s free trial to perform a free network assessment (POC) to quickly determine if your network is causing problems, and gather information to help you troubleshoot.
● Qualify your network for a deployment or migration:
You can qualify your network for a new service deployment or migration, and perform a risk assessment to pinpoint issues that may cause problems in the future. Examples include:
1. Migration from on premise PBX to hosted VoIP
2. Migration from VoIP to Microsoft Teams or other UC platforms
3. Or any other on-premises-to-cloud migration
2. Network Troubleshooting
● Troubleshoot intermittent issues:
Obkio is more than just fault monitoring – it detects and troubleshoots any network performance degradation or slowness as soon as it happens.
Identify intermittent network problems that are often difficult to pinpoint and use Obkio’s Traceroute and Device Monitoring features to troubleshoot in minutes.
● Fast ROI and ROE:
Get ROI, or like we like to say ROE (Return on Effort), by quickly solving network problems within a few hours, with Obkio’s free trial.
● Fast deployment and ease-of-use:
Obkio is designed to be easy to install and simple to use. Obkio monitors network performance without changing any configurations in your network or devices.
This means that Obkio is complementary and can be used with other monitoring solutions in your environment.
3. Continuous Network Monitoring
● Monitoring with synthetic traffic:
Obkio continuously monitors using synthetic traffic instead of capturing user traffic. With no packet capture required, it secures users’ privacy and doesn’t require changes to network device configurations.
● Get the end-user perspective:
Monitoring with synthetic traffic using monitoring agents simulates the true end-user experience. Obkio monitors using the same network path as the users’ traffic, which is not possible with centralized solutions when using distributed applications.
This ensures that you have no blind spots and can identify network issues before actual users do.
● Decentralized/ distributed monitoring
To adapt to new distributed cloud architectures, Obkio monitors using a decentralized/distributed strategy which provides network performance data based on the information provided by multiple Monitoring Agents.
This creates a true end-to-end monitoring solution that covers your entire network.
● Anomaly detection based on performance baseline:
Most network monitoring solutions will send alerts based on usage thresholds. This generates a lot of false positives and when we’re constantly flooded with notifications, we start to ignore them.
Obkio only sends notifications for anomaly detection based on historical performance to highlight events that impact the end-user experience like high packet loss, latency, or jitter.
Try It Yourself
In conclusion, Obkio is a network performance monitoring software designed to be easy to install, easy to use, with a focus on helping you not only identify network performance issues but also help you troubleshoot in minutes.
Just by using Obkio’s free 14-day trial, you can optimize your network performance, troubleshoot problems, and create your ideal performance baseline with an immediate ROI.
As network infrastructures change and evolve, make sure that your business is equipped with a tool to help you ensure the best network and application experience possible.