Network Congestion, similar to road congestion, occurs when your network cannot adequately handle the traffic flowing through it.

While network congestion is usually temporary, it can cause annoying network problems that can affect performance and can be a sign of a larger issue in your network.

That's why you need an end-to-end monitoring tool to help you proactively detect network congestion.

1. Deploy End-to-End Network Monitoring

Obkio Network Monitoring continuously monitors end-to-end network performance from your local network (LAN, VPN), as well as third-party networks (WAN, ISP, and Internet Peering).

1. Identify Network Congestion with Core Network Metrics

Network Congestion can happen in your own network, in your ISP's network, on the local loop of its connection , or even on the Internet.

So you can detect network congestion by monitoring other core network metrics with Obkio.

Network congestion can cause dropped packets (aka packet loss), and increased latency and jitter.

That’s because, when network congestion occurs, data packets can accumulate, leading to a huge buffer. It then takes time to empty and refill the buffer, which increases latency and jitter.

1. Monitor Network Devices

Because network congestion can be caused by overused network equipment, you can use Network Device Monitoring to monitor your own network equipment, and measure the quantity of traffic going through your devices.

1. Identify a Lack of Resources

Network congestion commonly occurs when your network devices or Internet connection are lacking the resources available to process traffic flowing through the network.

Set up Network Device Monitoring with SNMP monitoring to poll interfaces and graphs for Bandwidth usage (inbound / outbound traffic), Short bursts of traffic, 0r CPU utilization that affect network performance

With this setup, you can now proactively detect and troubleshoot network congestion before it starts impacting your network performance and user experience!

Use Obkio’s Getting Started Tutorial to set this up for free! obkio.com/docs/getting-started/

Learn more in our full blog post: https://obkio.com/blog/how-to-detect-network-congestion/