The Benefits of Cloud Network Monitoring

November 25, 2020 Off By David

Written by: Alyssa Lamberti, Digital Marketing Specialist at Obkio

As businesses make the move towards cloud-based network infrastructures and applications, SaaS and Cloud services increase the pressure on IT teams to accurately monitor a network from all locations.

Since networks are often the backbone of businesses, it’s important to monitor your cloud network performance to ensure everything is working as it should and quickly find and fix network issues before they cause serious disruptions to your business.

In this article, I’ll be giving you an overview of the key benefits of cloud network monitoring for individuals and businesses of all sizes.

Why Cloud Network Monitoring?

Many businesses are turning to remote offices, storing their data in the Cloud, and ditching centralized data infrastructures The transition to cloud-based services has led many businesses to abandon traditional centralized infrastructures and switch to a more distributed or decentralized architecture.

This can quickly complexify data flows between users, making traditional monitoring tools unsuitable for the task at hand.

A distributed or decentralized Cloud Network Monitoring solution uses network data provided by multiple network monitoring Agents, about a specific monitored object, or target within a network, in order to determine the performance status of the target independently from conditions that may affect the other Agents.

It helps users and businesses monitor network performance up to their cloud infrastructure for applications like ERP, CRM, Office 365, G Suite and more.

Now let’s get into the benefits!

Simplify the Transition to the Cloud

Cloud network monitoring is not only beneficial to monitor cloud applications after they’ve been deployed, but it can also help you make the switch.

Organizations are increasingly using cloud-hosted applications services. This is not only the case with productivity tools like Office 365 or Google Workplace. They also use that model for business-critical applications such as ERP, CRM, and other project management tools.

Accessing these services through a centralized Internet gateway, often hundreds if not thousands of miles away, doesn’t work. The few milliseconds of round trip time added to each transaction quickly adds up to a considerable delay.

This is where you need distributed cloud network monitoring which can accurately monitor your network’s performance from a user’s perspective and from every possible angle.

Locate & Fix Network Problems

Monitoring cloud network performance helps you quickly and easily pinpoint the location and cause of a problem anywhere along your network. It allows you to gather all information about a network problem to understand where it’s located, what caused it, when it happened, and who is responsible for solving it.

With all this information on hand, you can easily troubleshoot network problems affecting any cloud-based applications or services.

A tool, like Obkio Network Performance Monitoring software, will monitor end-to-end network performance for you, and notify you if problems arise, so you can be proactive and productive. Obkio discovers network issues anywhere along your complete network path. This is becoming more and more important with SaaS and SD-WAN infrastructures, which traditional network monitoring software lacks the ability to properly monitor.

Pinpoint Network Slowdowns

Unlike traditional fault monitoring systems, complete network monitoring allows you to locate any network slowdowns and not just hard failures. Any performance degradation can be a warning sign of a much larger issue, so it’s important to address any signs of performance deterioration before it turns into a bigger problem.

Continuously monitoring your cloud network gives you the opportunity to be proactive, and understand what’s causing network slowdowns, so you can fix them before your users start experiencing them.

Identify A Performance Baseline:

How do you know if your cloud apps are working as they should be? Cloud network monitoring allows you to collect historical data to establish a baseline network performance level to easily compare good performance with poor performance. This way, you can easily understand when your cloud apps are underperforming.

It also allows network administrators and service providers to go back in time to identify intermittent issues that may be hard to pinpoint, or may have happened in the past.

You essentially have access to a variety of network data that you can leverage in multiple ways to optimize your network infrastructure and business operations.

Improve Your End-User Experience

Good network performance is based on the network’s ability to meet a user’s expectations. If your users are experiencing problems with choppy video calls, slow downloads speeds, or VPN disconnection, it’s a pretty clear indication that your network is not performing well.

A continuous network performance monitoring solution can help you identify, locate, and solve issues before they start affecting end-users. With automatic alerting, a network performance monitoring solution, like Obkio, will notify you of network performance degradation, before your users do.

This ensures that users always receive the best user experience possible, and can work without any network disruptions.

In Conclusion

There are many benefits to cloud network monitoring, which is why it’s become such a necessary practice for modern, growing businesses that rely on cloud-based applications and infrastructures to function.

It allows you to monitor the performance of applications, devices, and network segments up to your cloud infrastructure to improve the end-user experience, identify and fix network issues, and collect network data to optimize business performance.

So, during your next executive meeting, make sure to add a cloud network monitoring solution to the table.

Alyssa Lamberti, Digital Marketing Specialist

Alyssa is a resident blogger and Digital Marketing Specialist for Obkio, a montreal-based network performance monitoring software. After graduating with a degree in English Literature, Alyssa has worked as a copywriter and digital marketing expert to help companies in the tech industry establish marketing strategies, create content, and grow their presence internationally. Alyssa is always looking for creative and innovative ways to share tech information with experts as well as everyday users.