Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Network observability may be seen as a newer term in the world of networking, but it has become critical for managing modern distributed networks. As networks grow more complex with cloud services, remote workers, and distributed applications, traditional network monitoring approaches no longer provide sufficient visibility into network health and performance.

A decade ago, network monitoring was straightforward. You had a data center, some branch offices, MPLS circuits connecting everything, and a handful of applications running on-premises. Set some SNMP thresholds, configure a few alerts, and you were covered. When something broke, the problem was usually obvious: a failed switch, a saturated link, a misconfigured router. Today's networks bear zero resemblance to that world.

VoIP jitter is the variation in packet arrival time during voice calls, measured in milliseconds. When voice packets travel across your network at inconsistent intervals; some arriving faster, others slower—you experience jitter. Acceptable jitter for VoIP is 30 milliseconds or less. Above this threshold, you'll notice choppy audio, robotic voices, delays, and call drops that disrupt business communication.

For those who don't know Obkio, we're a synthetic Network Performance Monitoring, Troubleshooting and Diagnostics platform. We help network teams identify, diagnose, and resolve performance issues across distributed networks, from remote offices to cloud applications. For years, we've focused on what we do best: agent-to-agent performance monitoring.

Microsoft Teams has become the collaboration backbone for businesses worldwide. But when call quality drops during a crucial client meeting or files won't upload before a deadline, productivity grinds to a halt. The frustration? These issues are usually preventable. The challenge with Teams is that problems can originate from multiple sources: user devices, network infrastructure, or Microsoft's platform itself.

Microsoft Teams is one of the most popular tools for work communication today. Whether you're chatting with your team, jumping on a video call, or sharing files, it helps keep everyone connected. But let's face it – MS Teams isn’t perfect. You’ve probably run into issues like calls dropping, bad audio, or slow Teams performance. These problems can be frustrating, especially when you’re in the middle of an important meeting or deadline.

Cloud network monitoring software is a type of software designed to monitor and manage the performance, availability, and security of networks and network devices in cloud environments. These tools use various techniques to gather information about network traffic, bandwidth utilization, application performance, and other metrics related to network health and availability.

Your users are complaining about slow application performance. Your monitoring dashboard shows all devices are green, routers operational, switches functioning, and bandwidth utilization is normal. Yet something is clearly wrong. The problem isn't your equipment; it's the path between your users and their destinations. This is where network path monitoring comes in.

Let’s talk about the most fundamental network diagnostic tools: ping and traceroute. These command-line utilities have been the backbone of network troubleshooting for decades, yet many IT professionals struggle to use them in the right context. Knowing which tool to use (and when) can mean the difference between a five-minute fix and hours of frustration. While both ping and traceroute help diagnose network connectivity issues, they serve distinctly different purposes.

How many times has this happened? You're on a Microsoft Teams call, and your call disconnects, lags or freezes. so you go to Google to look up how to solve the problem. Well look no further! If you're using Microsoft Teams, there are proven ways to troubleshoot those pesky performance and connection issues that are putting a damper on your team's collaboration.