Network path analysis

Uninterrupted connectivity should be a top priority for any business. However, ensuring constant, unbroken contact between a source and a destination in a network has always been a labor-intensive process in network communication. It's critical to be aware of the roadblocks in your network path, identify them, and resolve them swiftly in order to maintain a healthy, uninterrupted network.

Why monitor your network path?

Network path analysis

Maintaining network health is the most important factor in any LAN or WAN network. During data transmission, it's impossible to pinpoint and troubleshoot anomalies, such as packet loss or transit delays, that occur at hops in your network path. Many organizations depend on cloud services like Office 365 or Zoho Mail or CRM for their routine activities, and problems with these services can be found and rectified easily if they exist within your LAN. However, if the problem lies outside the local network, you need to be able to identify the exact hop where the problem is and inform the service provider so they can quickly restore the service.

In these cases, monitoring your network path can help you keep an eye on all the critical parameters of your network and address real-time issues. A network path analysis tool also allows you to ascertain information such as latency and packet loss at any point in your network to provide enhanced quality of service to end users.

OpManager's network path analysis tool

Along with its advanced availability and performance monitoring functions, OpManager also offers a complete in-house network path analysis tool to visualize and continuously monitor your network path's performance. The tool enables you to track the hop-by-hop performance across multiple paths between a source and a destination, helps in visualizing network routes from a probe to its destination, and also aids in maintaining the path history to help you identify the communication delays in each path traversed.

How does network path analysis software work?

OpManager plots an enhanced diagram of all TCP requests in the network to easily visualize the critical paths between the probe and its destination. It also identifies individual hops in the path, tracks the time taken by the data packet during individual hops, and provides results that can be leveraged to measure the transit delays of packets and outages across your network. OpManager uses TCP SYN packets rather than ICMP or UDP packets, which are used in traditional traceroute tools but may be blocked in a secure network.

The collected data and the path history are retained in the Network Path Analysis tool. This helps in analyzing the hop-by-hop pattern, identifying the root cause of any packet loss or latency throughout the path, and to predict any upcoming network outages.

Key features of Network Path Analyzer

• Visualize traffic patterns and analyze your network infrastructure

• Get complete performance insights into your network paths

• Gain in-depth visibility into your network path history

• Receive alerts and notifications when something goes wrong

Visualize traffic patterns and analyze your network infrastructure

• With OpManager's Network Path Analysis software, get a complete picture of the network paths taken by a packet from its source to its destination. This helps you assemble all the necessary data regarding the communication between a source and destination.
• View a topology diagram of the path, including the time taken for a data packet to travel from a source to a destination and the overall duration. Also, hovering over the network paths gives you insights on response time and latency between each hop.
• Use OpManager's advanced probing to detect the network analysis path over LAN and WAN.

Get complete performance insights into your network paths

• Determine the performance of every node and link in the path with the accumulated data with our Network Path monitor.
• Predict impacts that may harm a node or link by analyzing the traffic patterns in OpManager.
• Get detailed information on packet loss data and the overall latency during individual hops, and determine the hop-by-hop performance for the entire path. Set thresholds for these values and be alerted when they're violated.

Gain in-depth visibility into your network path history

• Be aware of your network path history for complete visibility into the paths taken by data packets traveling from a source to a destination. Understand the multiple paths taken by a data packet to reach its destination. This will help you identify issues on your service provider's side and helps in quick troubleshooting.
• Fix anomalies, find the shortest route, and make your network more efficient.
• Get a complete analysis of the overall network traffic, with specific hop-by-hop performance metrics for better network planning with OpManager's Network Path Analyzer.

Receive alerts and notifications when something goes wrong

• Get alerts on the various metrics of your network path. Be notified when a longer latency or higher packet loss is detected between a source and a destination during data transfers.
• Set thresholds for latency and packet loss metrics and be notified when they're violated.
• Associate Notification Profiles and be informed about the availability and performance of all the devices in your network.
• Receive updates on the working state of your source and destination devices (when discovered in OpManager). Also, perform availability and performance monitoring for all the devices in your network.

Other OpManager-specific functionalities

You can further associate performance monitors to track all related metrics and generate built-in reports based on the monitors assigned. Use OpManager dashboards and widgets specific to Network Path Analysis to maintain a bird's eye view on your critical devices.