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10 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Network Performance Management Solutions - Part 1

Jay Botelho

Network performance is one of the most critical aspects of successful business operations. Effective network performance enables internal and external communication between various company locations, as well as clients and partners — imperative in today's dispersed workforce. When networks do not perform well and experience malfunctions and failures, companies face disruptions and loss of business continuity. Understanding how efficiently and effectively a network performs helps mitigate these issues, leading to increased productivity and profitability.

Successful insight into the performance of a company's networks starts with effective network performance management (NPM) tools. However, with the plethora of options it can be overwhelming for IT teams to choose the right one. Here are 10 essential questions to ask before selecting an NPM tool.

Question #1: Does the solution provide comprehensive End-to-end visibility?

With today's digital landscape, network management solutions must support a high-performance digital experience and deliver comprehensive, application-focused analysis, processing data from many locations, including routers, firewalls, and more. It also must be able to alert on network and application-performance issues anywhere in the network path, displaying these alerts as part of the end-to-end flow map which helps find the root cause of issues more quickly.

A modern NPM solution must provide correlated information from the entire network, including complex, hybrid environments.

Question #2: Does your solution provide visibility into SD-WAN?

As organizations become increasingly distributed, many look to SD-WAN for better communications and lower costs. This makes SD-WAN a critical element in your network infrastructure, and one which must be factored into your end-to-end network visibility.

SD-WAN has a direct impact on network routing, and therefore on network latencies, so it's essential to ensure that SD-WAN is delivering the expected benefits from a network, security, and cost perspective. The dynamic nature of SD-WAN puts additional pressure on network performance monitoring, so be sure the NPM solution can easily track and visualize any WAN routing changes.

Question #3: Is cloud monitoring supported?

"Cloud" can mean different things to different organizations, but whether it's corporate applications in a hosted private cloud, full-on public cloud, or SaaS applications, the NPM solution must be able to monitor and visualize it, end-to-end. This may require the use of additional modules, and sometimes even proprietary features of the cloud provider, so it's important to determine up front both if, and how, the NPM solution will provide the end-to-end visibility you need to eliminate the blind spots that are common once applications are moved to the Cloud.

Question #4: Does the solution provide comprehensive application monitoring and optimization?

Optimized application performance is critical to business efficiency, yet optimization is becoming more complex as core business functions are moved out of the data center and distributed across multiple service and application providers. Legacy NPM solutions often lack the visibility needed to even monitor, much less optimize, these highly distributed applications.

To address this complexity, a network performance monitoring solution should tackle these three essential functions: application visibility, network optimization, and application performance assessment. It must address application performance within the context of network infrastructure metrics, since the applications do nothing useful without the network. Application performance can only be optimized when built on a solid network foundation, and an effective NPM solution must provide visibility into both.

Question #5: Does the solution provide insights into voice and video applications?

Gone are the days when voice and video ran on their own, expensive networks. Voice and video are now just other applications running on the network, and given their real-time nature, they are some of the most demanding applications. Both voice and video are extremely sensitive to network latency and packet loss. Voice and video traffic is useless if it's delayed more than a few hundred milliseconds, so voice and video traffic must be tagged and given priority on the network for these applications to work effectively.

If voice or video traffic is degraded, the source of that degradation is often network latency, so it's imperative that the NPM solution be able to visualize the traffic end-to-end, and quickly identify specific network hops that are introducing latency. The solution must also be able to analyze and report on the priority tagging of voice and video packets, called QoS (Quality of Service), and identify areas where QoS is not properly configured. And as a bonus, the solution should be able to correct QoS configuration issues to quickly restore the quality of voice and video communications.

Go to: 10 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Network Performance Management Solutions - Part 2

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10 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Network Performance Management Solutions - Part 1

Jay Botelho

Network performance is one of the most critical aspects of successful business operations. Effective network performance enables internal and external communication between various company locations, as well as clients and partners — imperative in today's dispersed workforce. When networks do not perform well and experience malfunctions and failures, companies face disruptions and loss of business continuity. Understanding how efficiently and effectively a network performs helps mitigate these issues, leading to increased productivity and profitability.

Successful insight into the performance of a company's networks starts with effective network performance management (NPM) tools. However, with the plethora of options it can be overwhelming for IT teams to choose the right one. Here are 10 essential questions to ask before selecting an NPM tool.

Question #1: Does the solution provide comprehensive End-to-end visibility?

With today's digital landscape, network management solutions must support a high-performance digital experience and deliver comprehensive, application-focused analysis, processing data from many locations, including routers, firewalls, and more. It also must be able to alert on network and application-performance issues anywhere in the network path, displaying these alerts as part of the end-to-end flow map which helps find the root cause of issues more quickly.

A modern NPM solution must provide correlated information from the entire network, including complex, hybrid environments.

Question #2: Does your solution provide visibility into SD-WAN?

As organizations become increasingly distributed, many look to SD-WAN for better communications and lower costs. This makes SD-WAN a critical element in your network infrastructure, and one which must be factored into your end-to-end network visibility.

SD-WAN has a direct impact on network routing, and therefore on network latencies, so it's essential to ensure that SD-WAN is delivering the expected benefits from a network, security, and cost perspective. The dynamic nature of SD-WAN puts additional pressure on network performance monitoring, so be sure the NPM solution can easily track and visualize any WAN routing changes.

Question #3: Is cloud monitoring supported?

"Cloud" can mean different things to different organizations, but whether it's corporate applications in a hosted private cloud, full-on public cloud, or SaaS applications, the NPM solution must be able to monitor and visualize it, end-to-end. This may require the use of additional modules, and sometimes even proprietary features of the cloud provider, so it's important to determine up front both if, and how, the NPM solution will provide the end-to-end visibility you need to eliminate the blind spots that are common once applications are moved to the Cloud.

Question #4: Does the solution provide comprehensive application monitoring and optimization?

Optimized application performance is critical to business efficiency, yet optimization is becoming more complex as core business functions are moved out of the data center and distributed across multiple service and application providers. Legacy NPM solutions often lack the visibility needed to even monitor, much less optimize, these highly distributed applications.

To address this complexity, a network performance monitoring solution should tackle these three essential functions: application visibility, network optimization, and application performance assessment. It must address application performance within the context of network infrastructure metrics, since the applications do nothing useful without the network. Application performance can only be optimized when built on a solid network foundation, and an effective NPM solution must provide visibility into both.

Question #5: Does the solution provide insights into voice and video applications?

Gone are the days when voice and video ran on their own, expensive networks. Voice and video are now just other applications running on the network, and given their real-time nature, they are some of the most demanding applications. Both voice and video are extremely sensitive to network latency and packet loss. Voice and video traffic is useless if it's delayed more than a few hundred milliseconds, so voice and video traffic must be tagged and given priority on the network for these applications to work effectively.

If voice or video traffic is degraded, the source of that degradation is often network latency, so it's imperative that the NPM solution be able to visualize the traffic end-to-end, and quickly identify specific network hops that are introducing latency. The solution must also be able to analyze and report on the priority tagging of voice and video packets, called QoS (Quality of Service), and identify areas where QoS is not properly configured. And as a bonus, the solution should be able to correct QoS configuration issues to quickly restore the quality of voice and video communications.

Go to: 10 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Network Performance Management Solutions - Part 2

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...