What Is Active Monitoring? | Tech Tips with Packet Boi

What is active monitoring? It's how you get in front of network performance issues, rather than reacting to them. Learn more! https://www.ixiacom.com/resources/ess...

Other helpful links:
Network Fundamentals: https://www.ixiacom.com/fundamentals-...
Hawkeye Active Monitoring Platform: https://www.ixiacom.com/products/hawk...
5 Ways To Improve Network Performance With Active Monitoring: https://www.ixiacom.com/resources/fiv...

When your business depends on peak performance, you cannot afford to wait until your monitoring tools detect a problem. By that time, your users may already be suffering. You need to anticipate problems and expose vulnerabilities before they have a chance to impact your end users. That’s why many companies are supplementing traditional network monitoring tools with ones that can perform active monitoring—which is also known as synthetic monitoring.

But what is that, you ask? Let’s break it down a little more.

Where traditional monitoring tools rely on passive data—logging network traffic and reporting link statuses as they occur in real time—active monitoring tools simulate highly realistic application traffic at scale and run it through your network continuously. The cool thing here is that, since you aren’t beholden to live traffic, you can vary up your simulations to observe how your network performs under various conditions and note where performance does not meet expectations.

Since you don’t have to wait for live traffic to measure response time, quality, or latency, active monitoring is also excellent for assessing network readiness before deploying things like SD-WAN, distributed unified communications, cloud applications, or voice and video services like Skype for Business. Moreover, most industry-leading tools offer a library of application signatures—which enables you to build super-accurate tests with the exact type of traffic you expect while varying the volume to model changes in demand.

Active monitoring platforms also let you conduct continuous quality of service testing on your live network as well. By simulating traffic from a variety of endpoints across your distributed network, you can measure performance in a wide range of operating scenarios. This means you can validate node to node connections in a distributed network, validate end user experience using cloud-based applications, or ensure adequate performance of your SD-WAN deployment.

Active monitoring gives you deep insight into your network by measuring key performance indicators such as packet loss, jitter, delay, response time, and traffic-specific factors such as Mean Opinion Score, among others. Granted, those details are only as good as the way in which they’re presented—which is why many leading platforms display those critical metrics on a highly-visual, real-time dashboard.

Sounds pretty great, right? But some active monitoring platforms take it a step further by employing machine learning to identify outliers based on either your own pre-defined thresholds or industry data. And with clearly-labeled with pass-fail results, it’s easy to cut through the clutter and prioritize your follow-up.

In addition to pre-deployment and live network assessments, you can also use continuous active monitoring to proactively maintain quality of service. If you run the same simulation every day and track the results over time, you can quickly identify deviations from the norm — giving you an early indication of when performance falls below minimum service levels. Just imagine being able to resolve issues before they ever impact live users. With active monitoring, it’s not just a fever dream. It’s easy.

And when it comes to troubleshooting, active monitoring can help you there as well. In fact, some platforms even go so far as providing you with a diagram of the actual path network packets take through your network.

But what does that mean? Well, with the complexity of today’s networks, the actual path traffic flows may differ substantially from what you think. Path discovery essentially acts as a better traceroute, enabling faster, more accurate troubleshooting.

But all that notwithstanding, the bottom line is this. Network performance is more critical than ever. And for operations teams that need a flexible, cost-efficient platform to maintain quality-of-service and prevent performance problems, active monitoring is more than worth the investment. So if you’re interested in learning more, check out a couple of our white papers linked above!

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