Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

VoIP is usually the first application to break when a network degrades. Calls run in real time over UDP, so a lost or late packet can't be resent. It's simply missing audio. A connection that handles email, file transfers and web browsing without complaint can still make every call sound broken. That's also why VoIP problems are hard to troubleshoot.

Your connection holds up all day. Then, in the evening, video calls start to stutter, pages take longer to load, and file uploads slow to a crawl. By the next morning, everything is back to normal, so any test you run during the day comes back clean. For a business, that pattern shows up in a few ways. A remote employee can’t get through an evening call. A branch office’s nightly backup never finishes.

Your Internet usually keeps disconnecting because of one of five things: a weak or congested Wi-Fi signal, a failing modem, router or cable, an overloaded firewall, a device-level setting or driver, or a problem on your ISP’s line or network. To fix it, first find where the drop happens: on one device, across your LAN, or past your firewall. “The Internet keeps droppin” is one of the most common tickets IT teams get, and one of the hardest to close.

The speed test shows 500 Mbps. Yet Microsoft Teams calls keep turning into people talking over each other, the CRM pauses on every click, and remote employees are opening tickets because the Internet is lagging. Nothing looks broken, which is exactly what makes lag so hard to troubleshoot. Why is my Internet lagging? If your Internet is lagging, your connection is slow to respond, not necessarily slow to download.

Your connection is fine in the morning and crawls every afternoon. Or video calls stutter while everything else loads normally. Either pattern could be ISP throttling. It could also be network congestion, or a problem inside your own network. ISP throttling is when your internet service provider intentionally slows your connection based on how much data you use, the type of traffic you send, the time of day, or the plan you’re on. Knowing throttling exists is the easy part. Proving it is harder.

You know the conversation. Calls are choppy, users are complaining, and Obkio shows packet loss on the path to your ISP. You open a ticket, and they reply, "Everything looks fine on our end." Now you're stuck taking screenshots, exporting graphs, and trying to explain data to someone who can't see it. Meanwhile, the problem keeps happening. Today we're launching Shareable Links. With one click, you can create a read-only link to any Network Monitoring Session and send it to anyone.

Packet loss rarely shows up as packet loss. Users report choppy Teams calls, frozen screen shares, slow SaaS apps, or a connection that feels unstable. By the time the ticket reaches IT, the issue has often cleared. Even small amounts of loss degrade real-time traffic. And because TCP retransmits every lost packet, sustained loss also cuts throughput for everything else on the link. Packet loss happens when data packets fail to reach their destination.

Obkio's ServiceNow integration is now live. When Obkio detects a network issue, it opens an incident in ServiceNow. When the issue recovers, it resolves that same incident. Your team works the problem in the platform they already use for incident management, with the monitoring context already attached.

Network diagnostics is the process of finding out why a network performance issue is happening: what's causing it, where and when it occurred, and who needs to fix it. It's the step between an alert telling you something is wrong and a fix being applied. For most IT teams, it's also the slowest part of resolving a network issue.

Your Internet circuit is up. The firewall shows the WAN link as connected, your ISP's status page is green, and a speed test comes back at full provisioned bandwidth. Meanwhile, Teams calls at one branch break up for ten minutes every afternoon, and every user at that site sees Salesforce slow to a crawl at the same moment. Then everything recovers before anyone can capture it.