Network Performance Management (NPM) is the process of monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing the performance of a network to ensure it runs efficiently and reliably. It involves tracking metrics like bandwidth usage, latency, packet loss, and network availability to detect issues, improve response times, and optimize network resources. The goal is to maintain optimal network performance, enhance user experience, and support business-critical applications.
To track and evaluate performance for your entire network infrastructure, NPM relies on various tools and processes. These include:
Network Performance Management tools and practices are critical for ensuring organizations and their networks operate efficiently and reliably day-to-day. Benefits include:
Network Performance Management (NPM) has evolved significantly over the years to address the changing landscape of technology and business needs. In the early stages (1990s to early 2000s), NPM, first invented by the introduction of NIKSUN's NetVCR platform, focused on core network monitoring, using tools to capture network traffic, analyze it, and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as network latency, response time, and device availability and uptime. As networks grew in size and complexity during the 2000s, more advanced monitoring emerged with the use of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), allowing for additional device analysis and tracking. The 2010s brought the widespread adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, which introduced new challenges and drove demand for cloud-aware NPM solutions to monitor hybrid environments. This period also saw a shift towards application-centric monitoring, linking network performance to business outcomes by focusing on optimizing application response times and user experiences.
By the late 2010s, the rise of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and network automation enabled greater agility and scalability through programmable network infrastructures. In recent years, NPM has integrated Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to provide predictive analytics, proactive issue resolution, and enhanced anomaly detection, making it an essential tool for managing the complexities of modern networks, including IoT, 5G, and multi-cloud environments. NPM has thus transformed from simple device monitoring to a strategic enabler of digital transformation and real-time business operations.
Broadly speaking, network performance management is about ensuring the speed, availability, and accuracy of your network infrastructure – the very lifeblood of your organization. But network performance management systems can present challenges and limitations that significantly compromise their effectiveness, including:
Let's look at how NIKSUN can solve all these NPM challenges.
Problem: Most NPM products rely on extrapolation from data samples to provide only a best-guess view your network, leading to gaps in monitoring and delayed responsiveness.
Solution: NIKSUN doesn't rely on sampling for NPM. Our comprehensive network-to-application performance solution gathers, warehouses, and cross-correlates every single unit of data that's transmitted across your entire organization – at any scale and in real-time. As an analogy, imagine that you want to understand traffic patterns across the entire country for every highway and road. Most tools would approach this performance monitoring task by doing the equivalent of taking a picture of a specific road at specific intervals, trying to get enough snapshots across all roadways in the system to paint a picture of what's going on. With this approach, you miss a lot. Taking snapshots means you're seeing only parts of the whole and are likely to overlook the small fender-bender a few miles up the road that's delaying traffic at another juncture, for example. This sampling approach can mislead you about the source of the problem because you're missing some of the critical information you need to learn the root cause. By contrast (and continuing with our analogy), NIKSUN's unique solution lets you to see every car on every roadway 24/7 x 365. Visualizing on your network ecosystem at this scale and with this level of detail means you're proactively alerted to anything you want to know as it's developing in your network at any time – and getting to the root-cause – so you don't miss a thing.
Problem: Many NPM solutions offer limited visibility and analysis capabilities, so you need to supplement them with additional tools.
Solution: NIKSUN's solution provides proactive end-to-end SLA / QoS monitoring and surveillance with continuous, interactive analysis from link to application and 100% visibility in multiple timeframes (from sub-milliseconds to months). By consolidating critical infrastructure and application monitoring and analysis capabilities, NIKSUN offers a highly valuable solution that immediately replaces multiple monitoring/troubleshooting devices and empowers enterprises with the key advantages of automation, triage, and cost-efficient instrumentation. All traffic is analyzed in real-time and each alert is linked to contextual analysis and corresponding data, giving users the option to immediately home in on the problem, even at sub-millisecond levels, for troubleshooting and root-cause discovery. Thanks to the embedded NIKSUN Network Knowledge Warehouse, NIKSUN can offer an analyzer that never forgets. With access to a large repository of actual traffic data from sub-second levels to hours and days or even months, you can "rewind" back in time to a problem event for troubleshooting and diagnosis. And with shared workspace and web-based link-to-application layer analysis, you can collaborate across the globe to troubleshoot and diagnose past or current problems, seamlessly.
Problem: Integrating NPM tools with existing IT infrastructure, applications, and other monitoring solutions can cause delays, tie up resources, and impede effectiveness.
Solution: NIKSUN turns these issues into non-issues. Our unified solution ensures that your teams don't need to hop between different tools to figure out what's going on. With NIKSUN, every piece of that data traversing your network is simultaneously captured, inspected, mined, correlated, and stored at rates through Multi-Tbps. What's more, our solution collects data from any source, and from anywhere in your network, including your firewalls, AAA systems, routers, switches, cloud, virtual infrastructure, web servers, databases, endpoints, networks, services, tools, and more. The data can be in any format – logs, device metrics (e.g., SNMP), cloud/app metrics, network traffic (e.g., flows and packets), and so on. Additionally, NIKSUN's all-in-one solution supports robust hybrid deployments, operating in any environment to deliver holistic, seamless insight for your entire infrastructure, regardless of scale. Because NIKSUN's platform consolidates every IT monitoring use case, without exception, into a single pane of glass, it essentially replaces over a dozen disparate tools that organizations operate today.
Problem: New NPM products can mean stress for employees and lots of training for organizations. Plus, you'll probably need to hire some experts.
Solution: NIKSUN makes it easy on everyone. Our click-to-install solution sets up in minutes, not months – no special knowledge or CLI configurations required. After a quick setup, you can start getting real-time detection of performance degradations and other important issues right away, along with any other information you want about your network. Intelligence is drawn automatically and directly from the data, free of errors and bias, and offers complete transparency so that even a non-technical executive can get the critical insights they care about for their business without effort. Role Based Access Control (RBAC) means users and administrators log into the same platform and see different configuration screens, which makes it easy for everyone to quickly learn the UI and allows admins to more easily tune their configurations. Since all the underlying data uses a common model, NIKSUN's platform can also be leveraged for the creation of functional ML and AI algorithms to free up employees even more and further hone the effectiveness of the platform setup – no experts required.
Problem: It can be cost-prohibitive to set up performance management tools, especially for a small business.
Solution: We've designed NIKSUN's platform to be extremely affordable and cost-effective at any scale – from small businesses to large enterprises and everything in between. Unlike others, our platform also scales economically, with zero hidden fees and lots of valuable freebies. We want to make sure that the NIKSUN's zero-loss, real-time monitoring technology, the same technology that protects and informs the U.S. Department of Defense, is available to every business that wants it, no matter what size.
NIKSUN is the recognized world leader in empowering organizations to Know the Unknown®. Since 1997, we have been committed to delivering the most innovative solutions for securing and optimizing the networks of over a thousand customers including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and service providers.
Our industry leading suite of scalable, forensics-based cyber security and network performance monitoring products provide customers with in-depth and actionable insight into security threats, performance issues, and compliance risks. NIKSUN's patented real-time analysis and recording technology is the industry's most comprehensive solution for securing and maintaining dynamic network infrastructure.