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Seven Tips for Optimizing Network Performance - Part 1

Jay Botelho

The network has grown increasingly complex within an incredibly short amount of time — and it's only getting more complicated with each passing day. In fact, according to Enterprise Strategy Group, 66% of organizations view their IT environments as more or significantly more complex than they were two years ago. This has put increasing pressure on networking teams to have increased visibility across new network landscapes and to solve problems quickly. But sorting through the mountain of alerts, trouble tickets and traffic to isolate whether a problem is the network or an application can be a daunting task.

Despite careful planning and monitoring, users still experience stuttering video calls, slow downloads, and dropped calls — all symptoms of common network problems. That's why proactive monitoring and optimization of the network is critical to keeping business operations running optimally. To help, let's look at some network performance management tips that can keep your team ahead of the curve.

1. Continuously Monitor Network Performance

With infrastructure now pushing into the cloud, new technologies like SD-WAN and SASE being a reality, having real-time insight into how traffic is moving across the extended network (including with remote workers) is basic table stakes. This rapid rise of new technologies has left some network performance monitoring solutions in the dust, and as discussed above, there's no management without monitoring. These legacy solutions have a clear focus (and strength) in data center monitoring, but fall short in areas like SD-WAN and oftentimes have nothing significant to offer regarding cloud monitoring.

Plan for upgrading these monitoring systems, including vendor migration if necessary, as part of your infrastructure upgrade, and find a single solution that can monitor your entire infrastructure. Too often the monitoring system update is trumped by the infrastructure upgrade, resulting in blind spots and reducing the effectiveness of determining the success of the infrastructure upgrade, not to mention the ability to troubleshoot issues with the new infrastructure.

2. Compare Network Performance

How can you tell if your infrastructure updates have improved your network performance if you don't have good data on the performance of your current infrastructure? The ability to compare baseline performance before and after a network change is the way network engineers measure success. The data that drives these baseline comparisons comes from network monitoring solutions.

Having a monitoring solution that best meets your needs in place before making network changes, especially major infrastructure changes, will set you up for success.

3. Determine When the Network is at Fault

When problems do occur, quick remediation is expected. There are often debates over whether it's the network or the application team's responsibility. Flow-based network monitoring data can provide some insight into the network vs. application question, but supplementing that with network packet data, and having it all available in a single solution, is the best way to isolate the problem.

Once you've isolated a network flow in question, packet data almost always provides clear evidence of whether the network or the application is at fault. Packet data provide a packet-by-packet view of the conversation — you can see every request, response, acknowledgement, etc. By reviewing the packets in the conversation, you can easily see what the network response times are, and the application response times.

If you see quick network acknowledgements, and then see long delays in getting any packets with data, it's a clear indication of an application problem and not a network problem. And packets provide the bonus of having detailed information in the payloads. Assuming the traffic is unencrypted, or can be unencrypted, packet payloads provide clues as to what is happening in the application, usually in the form of error messages embedded in the packet payloads.

Go to Seven Tips for Optimizing Network Performance - Part 2, with more tips for optimizing network performance

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Seven Tips for Optimizing Network Performance - Part 1

Jay Botelho

The network has grown increasingly complex within an incredibly short amount of time — and it's only getting more complicated with each passing day. In fact, according to Enterprise Strategy Group, 66% of organizations view their IT environments as more or significantly more complex than they were two years ago. This has put increasing pressure on networking teams to have increased visibility across new network landscapes and to solve problems quickly. But sorting through the mountain of alerts, trouble tickets and traffic to isolate whether a problem is the network or an application can be a daunting task.

Despite careful planning and monitoring, users still experience stuttering video calls, slow downloads, and dropped calls — all symptoms of common network problems. That's why proactive monitoring and optimization of the network is critical to keeping business operations running optimally. To help, let's look at some network performance management tips that can keep your team ahead of the curve.

1. Continuously Monitor Network Performance

With infrastructure now pushing into the cloud, new technologies like SD-WAN and SASE being a reality, having real-time insight into how traffic is moving across the extended network (including with remote workers) is basic table stakes. This rapid rise of new technologies has left some network performance monitoring solutions in the dust, and as discussed above, there's no management without monitoring. These legacy solutions have a clear focus (and strength) in data center monitoring, but fall short in areas like SD-WAN and oftentimes have nothing significant to offer regarding cloud monitoring.

Plan for upgrading these monitoring systems, including vendor migration if necessary, as part of your infrastructure upgrade, and find a single solution that can monitor your entire infrastructure. Too often the monitoring system update is trumped by the infrastructure upgrade, resulting in blind spots and reducing the effectiveness of determining the success of the infrastructure upgrade, not to mention the ability to troubleshoot issues with the new infrastructure.

2. Compare Network Performance

How can you tell if your infrastructure updates have improved your network performance if you don't have good data on the performance of your current infrastructure? The ability to compare baseline performance before and after a network change is the way network engineers measure success. The data that drives these baseline comparisons comes from network monitoring solutions.

Having a monitoring solution that best meets your needs in place before making network changes, especially major infrastructure changes, will set you up for success.

3. Determine When the Network is at Fault

When problems do occur, quick remediation is expected. There are often debates over whether it's the network or the application team's responsibility. Flow-based network monitoring data can provide some insight into the network vs. application question, but supplementing that with network packet data, and having it all available in a single solution, is the best way to isolate the problem.

Once you've isolated a network flow in question, packet data almost always provides clear evidence of whether the network or the application is at fault. Packet data provide a packet-by-packet view of the conversation — you can see every request, response, acknowledgement, etc. By reviewing the packets in the conversation, you can easily see what the network response times are, and the application response times.

If you see quick network acknowledgements, and then see long delays in getting any packets with data, it's a clear indication of an application problem and not a network problem. And packets provide the bonus of having detailed information in the payloads. Assuming the traffic is unencrypted, or can be unencrypted, packet payloads provide clues as to what is happening in the application, usually in the form of error messages embedded in the packet payloads.

Go to Seven Tips for Optimizing Network Performance - Part 2, with more tips for optimizing network performance

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

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 ...

Image
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 ...