We were talking to a friend recently about the importance of monitoring network performance. She owns a small business that relies heavily on the Internet to successfully run her day to day operations. After going over all the things the JitterWorks Network Performance Monitor can do. After explaining in painful detail the need for any company to track and trend LOTUs, she had a simple, if not a bit aggravating, response.

“Why do I need to know all that? I have a guy.”

Just about every company has a guy. An IT consultant that they can call when their network is going haywire. So you call the guy. You schedule an appointment. Then you wait for the guy. In the meantime, your employees are playing bridge in the break room because all their data is in the cloud. Production comes to a halt.

Eureka, your guy arrives to save the day. The problem is, he or she has no idea what is the problem. The guy needs to run a series of diagnostics to try to locate the problem. (Remember too, the guy is on the clock.) A couple hours, and a couple hundred dollars later, the guy gets your network up and running, and you get back to business.

We certainly mean no disrespect to the IT consultant. He or she plays an important roll in keeping any network-dependent business up and running. But the more information they have, the quicker and easier it is to solve the problem. Having a history of key network performance metrics – LOTUs – expedites the process.

A current JitterWorks client noticed a recurring issue with jitter. The historical latency graphs they have access to pinpointed the problem. When it became necessary to call in an IT consultant, they knew exactly what needed to be done to fix the problem.

It turned out that there was a history of heavy jitter during business hours. By cross referencing the data collected on bandwidth utilization, they ruled out heavy usage as the problem. We won’t go into trace routes and hops in this blog (spoiler alert for next week), but by isolating the problem, armed with good information, the issue was resolved quickly.

 It’s great to “have a guy.” Even better when you have historical information at your disposal. It makes their job more efficient and it puts an end to long bridge tournaments in the breakroom.