Last week we discussed the importance of tracking and trending latency and jitter on your network. High latency with a lot of jitter will result in “packet loss” or “dropped packets.”

Data travelling to its destination is broken up into small “packets.” If the packets are travelling at slow or different speeds due to high latency (network delays), it can cause significant problems.

Let’s talk about “data.” Many businesses refer to data in terms of various types of information. Customer records, corporate documents and spreadsheets, email, etc. In network industry terms, “data” is pretty much anything that is being transmitted over a network.

A data packet is like an envelope. It contains the delivery address, a return address and some form of content the sender is communicating. It could be a birthday card, a water bill payment or a quick note to an old friend. Sometimes the envelope, or packet, is deemed undeliverable.

Network protocols are constantly working to detect network congestion or bottlenecks caused by high latency. Once detected, these protocols allow for data packets to be dropped – packet loss. This occurs so the network can insure that as much data as possible is able to move through the system and reach its destination. 

The graph above was generated by the JitterWorks Network Performance Monitor running on a network at a live client site. What you want to see is a steady green line. That indicates consistent, acceptable latency and no packet loss. Light blue to red dots are varying degrees of packet loss. (If you see a lot of red, you may as well go to lunch.)

In this case, things were running well until about 9:30am where you see a spike in latency and blue and purple dots indicating packet loss. You can also see an increase in jitter represented by the black and grey areas. Notice some of the grey areas are off the chart. An Internet call would have been very choppy or dropped during this time. 

By tracking latency averages and jitter trends over a period of time and demonstrating how delays were affecting network performance, this JitterWorks client decided to switch from a Cable Internet provider to Fiber Optic. They have experienced a significant increase in speed – because of lower latency – and very little packet loss.

The lesson here is simple. Know your network. Find a device or service that gives you real time and historical access to the key performance metrics that allow you to keep on top of your network and keep your business running.